Remember to purchase your tickets by March 5th. No tickets will be sold at the door. No matter how much we like you. GYFO!

JOE

1. Glee. This new Fox tv show aired its pilot last month, and it was so popular that the producers have been pressed to come up with more content for fans. Apparently the feature song (Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’) was so popular on iTunes, that they’ve had to add additional music choices. The website is chock full of character interviews, actor bios and a photo gallery. Extras include Glee chewing gum (seriously), iTunes downloads and of course, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter fan clubs. Fans can be interacting with the stuff and feel that they stay connected until the show is back on in the fall.

2. New Moon. The highly anticipated follow up to the Twilight movie doesn’t hit theaters until November, but producers know that the fans don’t have that kind of patience. Posters for the new movie (with buffed up versions of hearthrobs Edward and Jacob) released online several weeks ago, and the producers brilliantly timed the trailer release with the MTV movie awards, where it got tons of hype. These two gifts to the fans were very well received. I’m curious what else they’ll give us between now and November.

So when you find a newspaper succeeding, it’s worth investigating. Fortunately, we have a hometown example: City Newspaper. They’re pulling off the neat trick of growing total audience while keeping the print side steady at about 100k. In this market and era, that’s noteworthy.

I called up Bill Towler, City’s co-publisher to get the scoop. He and his wife Mary Anna (editor and co-publisher) were nice enough to provide insight on how they’re doing it:

1) Go deep, but selectively. City focuses on a few areas that readers want – politics, urban development, arts – and goes deep. Decades of coverage provide institutional knowledge and the credibility to partner with expert free lancers. Recently, David Cay Johnston reported on Monroe County finances. You know, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, local resident, and expert on tax code. Hard to pull off if you try to cover everything.
2) No shrinking violet. City has a point of view and it’s ok with them if you disagree (trust me). From restaurant reviews to city council coverage, they take a stand and do it with reason.
3) More why, less what. “What happened” has a lot of competition, from CNN to Twitter. With a weekly schedule, City can’t offer that via print. Instead, they do context and analysis.

Each point enables City to strengthen a bond with core readers and stand out from the competition. Yeah, I know. “Choosing to differentiate” is no revelation. But it’s a good reminder that differentiation is rarely one decision. It’s how you come down on thousands of tough choices over years. Shrink the page. Don’t tick off the advertiser with that story. Cut back a bit on local coverage. It all adds up, or detracts.

Resilience isn’t a popular branding concept, but it ought to be.

Matt Jones

Ever been reading a magazine and wish you didn’t have to skip through all the crap? You know, the articles that no one with a pulse reads. Mine Magazine, a collabo between Time Inc. and Lexus tailors all the articles in the publication directly to you. Essentially allowing readers to focus in on what they care about and tune out the rest.

Choose 5 of your favorite magazines, answer a few behavioral insight questions, enter your mailing address and you’re done. In 2-4 weeks your custom made magazine will show up on your doorstep piping hot and ready to be read instead of skimmed.

I received my Mine this week. The Lexus ads using variable-data printing are compelling almost to the point of being creepy. But I love that.

Hyper-targeting individual consumers could be a game changer. It’s clearly a more cost-effective way to know exactly who’s listening to your message.

Big ups to p+n intern Dan Taylor from RIT for digging this one up. He rocks.

UPDATED: In response to Scott’s comment, I thought it was only fair that I share one of the other variable-data ads in the same issue of Mine. See below.

What I mean is that many companies want to—and have always wanted to—reach relatively affluent young men. It’s the golden demographic. Guys with disposable income that they readily spend on beer, gadgets, and shower gel that they hope will have hordes of women chasing them down the street like something out of A Hard Day’s Night.

(Maybe that isn’t the best example. These young guys probably don’t understand the phenomenon of women chasing Ringo down the street…On second thought, do any of us understand women chasing Ringo down the street?)

And where do you find all of these guys? In front of their computers on that productivity-killing Thursday and Friday in March, watching basketball. Pretending to work.

It’s likely that as viewing continues to move from TV to every other conceivable mobile device, more and more advertising will follow. And perhaps the first two days of March Madness, where men everywhere watch games online, will eventually replace the Super Bowl as the ultimate advertising event.

“Marketing Madness” if you will.

If it does, with the personalization made possible for the Internet, a guy goofing off in Rochester will see ads for Genesee, while a guy wasting his boss’s money in Philadelphia will see them for Yuengling.

But some things never change. No doubt we’ll all still have to watch Bud Light commercials that aren’t really funny.

While I get the concept that louder commercials will cut through the clutter and viewers will pay attention, I don’t know that I believe it. If people need to keep their remotes at the ready in order to lower commercial volumes, that can’t be good for anybody. Once that remote is itching in the hand it is so much easier to start clicking around. We all lose then. The advertiser, the station and the viewer who might not make it back.

What do you think? Is being loud a necessary evil to get people’s attention or is it more important to potentially keep that remote on the couch?

— Susan Cregan