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The NY Times will take down that annoying “you must login” to view this article. A similar announcement was made by the Wall Street Journal too. I think it’s likely that the rest of the news and magazine industry will follow their example and begin opening their gates for public consumption. Quite honestly, with their content being free and open, their materials are more likely to be referenced in blogs (just like this one) and they should be able to sell much, much, much more advertising.

ReportonBusiness.com says, “The Times figures it can more than replace the $10-million (U.S.) in subscriber revenue it generates each year with ad dollars from the increased traffic. And if the Journal follows, it will be betting that the profit from boosting its audience will exceed the industry-leading subscriber list it has amassed, with close to one million registered users.”

“…Internet advertising has become too powerful and too lucrative to block non-subscribers from your website, executives across the newspaper industry have told analysts and investors.”

Exciting!

In April, at the annual leadership conference for the American Marketing Association held in Chicago, the CEO announced that the association would be changing their logo. They have threatened to go away from the wishbone for many years, but this time they had rough drafts to show us. The new brand was revealed to a house full of marketers and there was a dull roar of mixed response. The new concept was based on a single letter, “M”.

If you were paying attention, you probably heard about the big event they put on called “M Planet“. Well, they want to follow that theme and essentially change the AMA into just “M”. So, in 2008 when I become president of the local chapter in Boston, I guess I will be, “MBristowe, president of MBoston”. It will be interesting to see if the letter “M” can become synonymous with “Marketing” and more specifically with the AMA.

Apparently the AMA is not alone in it’s hunt to own one of 26 letters of the alphabet as their brand. While Oprah Winfrey and Overstock were battling for the letter “O”, QVC has had it’s eye on the letter “Q”.

In fact, on October 1st, QVC will reveal another step in their push for a new brand of their own. On a huge New York bilboard, QVC will continue staking their claim on the letter “Q”. The first set of billboards they put out in early September, in NY, Philly and LA, had the catchphrase, “iQdoU?“. Most people had no idea what it meant, but changing a household name… or acronym in their case into a single letter isn’t the easiest thing to do I suppose.

Take a look at a video of the “QVC” billboard:

This new billboard reveals the answer to those who were wondering what it all means:

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