There's an old axiom in business. Nothing, absolutely nothing, beats word-of-mouth recommendations of your product or service. Nothing is better than having satisfied customers rave about you to their friends.

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company has announced the movement of creative and image advertising and marketing for its Kelly tire brand to Akron-based Hitchcock Fleming & Associates, an agency associated with Goodyear retail marketing for more than five decades. The move was made without an agency review.

Revenue Totals $392.9M; Smartphone Sell-Through Hits Record High, up 42% YoY

Palm, Inc. today reported revenue of $392.9 million in the second quarter of fiscal year 2007, ended Dec. 1. Smartphone sell-through for the period totaled a company record-high 617,000 units, up 42 percent year over year and up 8 percent sequentially.

JVC Partners with VMIX to Invite America to Create JVC Everio Hard Drive Camcorder Commercial; Winner to be Featured in Ad Spots to Air Live on Spike TV

Consumers were out in full force Black Friday to get the best deals possible, and sales trends indicated that they certainly did. According to leading consumer and retail information provider The NPD Group's weekly point-of-sale (POS) data* for the week ending November 25, consumer technology retail sales** grew nearly 12 percent to over two billion dollars. While that's a good showing for the start of the holiday season, and year-over-year dollar volume is growing, it's doing so at a slower rate.

Winds of ChangeCasting

In case you haven't heard, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion - a deal that made headlines and turned YouTube creators Steve Chen and Chad Hurley into twentysomething tycoons. YouTube's popularity (Time magazine named it "Invention of the Year") helped ignite a video communication explosion that is changing our perception of entertainment, advertising and news. It's a grassroots revolution based on information sharing and collaboration.

Creativity and emotion are what makes advertising successful, not the message it is trying to get over, new research shows.

Silver Hill Financial, LLC, a leading national real estate lender specializing in small-balance commercial loans, has launched an enhanced version of its online Marketing Toolkit. The Toolkit, available via Silver Hill's website, now offers mortgage brokers the ability to customize and download materials to their desktop for printing anywhere.

When a new hybrid car is marketed as being fuel efficient and powerful, how does the consumer interpret these two attributes that seemingly contradict each other? A new report from Penn State's Smeal College of Business examines how consumers reconcile paradoxical product attributes.