promotion

Quark and other similar design programs are infamous for having a very tough learning curve, making it extremely difficult for amateurs to pick them up and make anything of quality. The company is looking to make layout and design more accessible for the general public with the introduction of Quark Promote. The goal of Quark Promote is to allow individuals and small business owners to quickly and easily create promotional materials.

Quark Promote's online template gallery features professionally designed templates for everything ranging from business cards to letterhead. Once users pick a set that they like, the Quark Promote … Read more

Traffic Travis provides a simple set of tools for monitoring the popularity and potential viewings for a particular Web site. With great instructions and an easy layout, this is a fantastic Internet research tool.

The program's interface is impressively professional, with top-notch graphic design, intuitive navigation, and helpful tutorial videos that clarify every point. Traffic Travis provides four distinct functions that allow you to collect data and do research on your selected Web site. The first one searches for popular keywords and competition, and another shows your site's ranking amongst the top four search engines. Yet another tracks … Read more

For Madison Avenue, Facebook just got a little less free.

Last week, the massive social network announced that brands, advertisers, and marketers that want to run contests or sweepstakes on its platform have to go through an approval process first.

Getting that approval could be a new revenue stream for Facebook: according to multiple sources in the marketing industry, they're being told that running a promotion in a Facebook application or "fan page" requires buying ad space too.

It's pricey. The minimum ad buy is $10,000 for 30 days, using Facebook's self-service advertising system, … Read more

Chalk one up for the cringe-worthy marketing term "personal branding": there is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.

"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," … Read more

We are halfway through the summer, and halfway until the start of the new television season. Promotional spots for all our new shows are on the air. We're producing what is called the "key art" for the print ads and billboards. That's the photo design and ad copy we hope will get your attention in less than 2 seconds.

TV critics are attending what's called the "Press Tour," when the television press gathers in a Los Angeles area hotel for a few weeks. The broadcast and cable networks come in one by one … Read more

Twitter and self-promotion go together like peanut butter and jelly, but without the right tools it takes work. I've recently begun using a handy service called Autopostr that takes most of that work out of the equation, by posting whichever of my Flickr photos I want straight to Twitter with a minimal amount of effort.

On any photo or photos you wish to share with your Twitter buddies you simply add a hash (#) in the title or "autopostr" as a photo tag. The service scans your Flickr account every five minutes, and takes any of those tagged … Read more

OK, we've screened the pilots, discussed the merits of every show, developed a new fall schedule, and unveiled it to the world. So, do things slow down now? No! It's the busiest time in "Network TV Land," because this is when we develop our marketing plans for the new shows and create all the advertising for TV, radio, print, outdoor, and digital...you name it. But this is the fun part. CBS has a really solid schedule of returning shows, and four new ones will join the lineup in September. Now is the time we develop … Read more

Canon has recently launched an instant rebate promotion for a few of its DSLR products. You can save up to $500 on lenses, up to $300 on a new camera, and up to $70 on Speedlites and accessories. Of course, only a select few products qualify for the rebate, and you might be saving only 10 percent off the original price. Still, the lenses eligible for the rebate are very good (for example, the highly praised 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM), and if you've been lamenting the high cost of lenses, now may be the time to jump … Read more

Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, just got a promotion to corporate vice president, as reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Gutierrez, who has taken an increasingly active role in Microsoft's intellectual-property strategy since moving back from Paris a few years ago, where he had served as Microsoft's associate general counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa (and where I first met him for hot chocolate and coffee), is well-known to the open-source crowd for his involvement in Microsoft's accusations in 2007 that Linux violates 235 of Microsoft's patents.

This, however, doesn'… Read more