National Media Corp. formed a strategic alliance with Mitsui & Co., LTD,
Japan, to jointly pursue electronic commerce opportunities in Japan.
Additionally, the two companies entered into a new contract to seek media
partners for home shopping programming throughout much of Asia and Australia.
The agreement expands National Media’s strategic relationship with Mitsui, an
international trading company based in Japan with more than $100 billion in
annual revenues.
National Media, which is leveraging its media and programming infrastructure
through electronic commerce, has recently debuted three full-time video
programming channels over the Internet at www.broadcast.com/shopping/ and,
this Thanksgiving weekend, is debuting its Everything4Less Web site, an
electronic commerce/Internet and catalog-based membership shopping service,
which provides more than 800,000 products at guaranteed low prices.
The Everything4Less advertising campaign, featuring “America’s favorite TV
moms”–Shirley Jones (“the Partridge Family”), Florence Henderson (“the
Brady Bunch”), and Marion Ross (“Happy Days”) will be included within the
2,000 half-hours of infomercials that National Media broadcasts nationwide
each week.
After Thanksgiving, the Web site for Everything4Less can be found at www.E4L.com.
“One of the many reasons why electronic commerce is growing at an
incredible rate is that it knows no geographic boundaries,” said Steven C. Lehman, chairman and chief executive officer of National Media. “As a company
operating in 73 countries around the world, National Media has the
international infrastructure that can be quickly leveraged to give us a truly
global electronic commerce platform. We are delighted to work with Mitsui. . . to
achieve this goal.”
National Media is a direct response television company and e-commerce firm
broadcasts more than 3,000 half-hours of programming each week throughout the
world and claims to reaches every television home in the United States and
more than 370 million television households in more than 70 countries
worldwide.