A Virginia man is facing 10 years in prison for posting movies online. His website once released the latest Star Wars movie six hours before it hit theaters nationwide. Investigations by the FBI, including the field office in Richmond, VA, have led to the conviction of Daniel Dove, 26, on counts of conspiracy and felony… Read more »
Media/Marketing/Advertising
Local scrap-booking company to appear in Martha Stewart Living
Do a Google search for Tabitha Geary and 37,900 hits come back. After clicking through eight pages worth of links and being confronted time and time again by the same face, it seems that there is no other Tabitha Geary than the Richmonder who owns a scrap-booking company that bears her name. And now Geary’s… Read more »
Roll the cameras: Fox 35 killing cats
Talk about a cat fight. When local TV station WRLH Fox 35 hired an exterminator to kill feral cats in a back lot of its building, the local SPCA got wind and unleashed a save-the-kittens firestorm. Now the station is dealing with a far larger problem than a few alley cats: a PR snafu that… Read more »
Media General CEO predicts mergers
Media General CEO Marshall Morton says major American newspapers will have to join forces in order to stay alive. “There’s got to be some assimilation, I would guess that rather than bankruptcies, you’d see some combinations,” he says in a story that appeared in Monday’s NY Times. Ad revenue at newspapers across the country is… Read more »
Networking online … helpful or just a passing fad?
The professional networking site LinkedIn just raised $53 million in capital, which pegs the company’s valuation at around $1 billion. Technology analysts are wondering if that’s a tad high. How much social networking sites can extract from advertisers and subscribers, after all?
$25 gas card for out-of-town visitors
Drive to Richmond. Stay in a hotel for two nights. Get a $25 gas card. That’s the pitch of an ad currently running in Roanoke, Washington D.C. and Hampton Roads. The Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, which promotes the Richmond region as a tourist destination, is paying for the spots. The ads link to… Read more »
Chariots of PR Gold
Buck Ward just batted for the PR cycle. His new Segway of Richmond shop in Shockoe Bottom garnered a full-length story in Style Weekly, one in Brick Weekly, and two stories in the Times-Dispatch. There’s also a lengthy plug on the Richmond Region Visitor Center, which promotes the area as a tourist destination. (That would… Read more »
CEO Tube
Randy Copeland, CEO of the high-end computer manufacturer Velocity Micro, doesn’t take himself too seriously. When Velocity marketing associate Josh Covington sat Copeland in a green leather chair, handed him a pipe and yelled, “Action!”, Copeland played along, deadpanning into the camera, “Hello friend, I didn’t see you there.” “Yeah, that was my idea,” Covington… Read more »
Ad Report Card: The lady in the tub
This ad scores where most fail: it draws our attention. But do the ad’s creators, the local firm Becker and Calliott, rely a little too heavily on sex appeal?
T-D looks in the mirror
Newspapers have a hard time covering themselves. On Sunday the T-D looked inward. John Reid Blackwell, wrote about the mighty struggles at the paper’s parent, Media General. “In the past two decades, the company’s strategy has been to build a newspaper and television empire in the Southeast and to combine and find collaborative opportunities at… Read more »