In what Yahoo hopes to be a life-altering deal, the aging internet company acquired social media site Tumblr for $1.1 billion, affectively gaining the attention of millions of users that visit Tumblr monthly (that is, if they all don't jump ship first).

Purchase rumors began to swirl last week after the company's CFO Ken Goldman spoke of Yahoo's "aging demographic" and their need to be "cool" again. With the acquisition now official, Yahoo will suddenly be knee deep in the content-consuming, uber-engaged millennials that it craves, but the question is whether Tumblr's core users will stick around for fear that Yahoo will alter the blogging site—or whether advertisers and brands can handle the rough-and-tumble world of Tumblr.

However, CEO Marissa Mayer was quick to assure users (with her first Tumblr post, of course; she also launched her own Tumblr and showed a sense of humor over the "WFH" debate) that Yahoo would "not screw it up" and had no plans to tamper with the site or its crew. Mayer's post, in the copyright-flouting spirit of Tumblr, used an image that without first getting its creator's permission.

Founder David Karp—who is slated to become Forbes' youngest billionaire—will remain at the head of the company along with his team. According to Mayer, it seems the only major plans Yahoo has for Tumblr (besides not screwing it up) are more opportunities for native advertising (aka advertorials or sponsored content, which Karp & Co. have been testing in the wake of earlier stumbles) in addition to implementing Yahoo search on Tumblr to start mining all that juicy millennial user data.Continue reading...

LUNA Bar is rebranding itself as a “thought leader” on women’s nutrition, and expanding its reach to include dieters.

Its six "Debunking the Diet" webisodes, hosted by "Funny or Die" writer/actor Erin Gibson and nutritionist Tara DelloIacono Thies, premiered this week with a focus on weight gain and late-night eating.

The spots support the brand's new tagline, "Feed Your Strength," and are appearing on Luna's Facebook and YouTube pages as well as health-related websites, The Huffington Post and Daily Candy.  Other campaign messages include “Moderation, not deprivation” and “Strong beats skinny.”Continue reading...

The annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that's now underway in Las Vegas is not only the world's biggest trade show, but a snapshot of how the fast-moving world of technology innovation is impacting sectors. Witness automotive, such as Ford's just-announced mobile partnerships to enhance the brand's in-car connectivity platform as part of a bigger CES push by car manufacturers this year.

CES is also a soapbox for competitors to one-up one another as they spit out product announcements and flaunt new alliances. This year, the rivalry is particularly fierce in the web TV/digital streaming arena.

"As new Internet TV players look to invade the living room, some cable and satellite operators are stepping up their embrace of Web technology to jazz up aging interfaces and head off subscriber defections, the Wall Street Journal reports from the show.

CES attendees include DirecTV and Dish Network on the satellite side, Verizon (FiOS) and AT&T (U-verse) touting Telco TV, and U.S. multi-system operators including Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications are at CES to recast themselves as web TV purveyors and shake off the dreaded "cable operator" moniker. No wonder the U.S. National Cable & Telecommunications Association is reportedly considering dropping "cable" and rebranding to the U.S. Internet and Television Association (but, oddly, keeping the NCTA acronym).

AT&T's U-verse platform is introducing "Screen Pack," a $5 per month addition to existing subscriptions which enables customers to stream some 1,500 on-demand movies. AT&T plans to add more content in the future in an effort to thwart the flood of video streaming competitors in the space.Continue reading...

Started by a woman in a time when women didn't start companies. Governed for nineteen generations, not by a corporate policy, but by a family philosophy. Brewed naturally by master craftsmen the same way today as it has been for almost four hundred years. Passing on old traditions while making new ones, takes time.

That's the pitch that Kikkoman US is hoping will bring viewers and distributors to Make Haste Slowly: The Kikkoman Story — a 24-minute commissioned film on the Japanese brand's almost 400-year history — with the hopes it picked up by a TV network as a non-fiction program. “Audiences want authenticity,” said the short's Academy Award-nominated director Lucy Walker to Adweek. “Nobody’s going to watch 24 minutes of phony stuff.” Check out another clip below.Continue reading...

Target recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, but don’t think this retailer is getting old and stuck in its ways. Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Jones, who joined the organization earlier this year, is planning to put a good deal of energy into digital content rather than simply in pushing out marketing campaign after campaign.

“In the past, marketers would make campaigns, they would put them in the world, and they would wait to see what happened,” Jones said in a video released on the brand's A Bullseye View website and YouTube channel. “In today’s world, it happens hourly. It happens daily. And this is a brand that has such enriched deep content that our guests want to hear from us on. So if we can create content and share content and allow our guests to speak on our behalf, that’s really beneficial for them to deepen their engagement and it helps us amplify our message as well.”Continue reading...

More and more TV viewers are turning to the web for their audio-visual pleasures, streaming shows and movies from such places as Hulu, Netflix, and AppleTV, among a growing list of others. 

YouTube, of course, is the grandpa of the online video-entertainment biz and is refusing to take a backseat to all the Johnny-come-latelys that are making their moves now. In the past year, YouTube owner Google has invested more than $100 million in 100 original channels to invite brands and professional producers create original high-quality content for the site. Even though viewership numbers weren’t particularly high, the site is shelling out some big bucks again, but this time to only 30 or 40 of those content creators, according to AllThingsD.com.

The metric of most interest to YouTube (and parent Google) execs is “the total ‘watch time’ a channel has generated” as well as cost, AllThingsD reports. The site’s top 25 channels averaged more than a million views a week, Ad Age reports, and “the top 33 have more than 100,000 subscribers, a key indicator of repeat viewing.”Continue reading...

The New York Times' Stuart Elliott broke the story this morning about Coca-Cola relaunching its corporate website. Armed with that revamped website, Coca-Cola now wants to break more of its own stories.

While maintaining the same website address for the Coca-Cola Company, the content is now arranged and commissioned to resemble a slick magazine or digital media brand's website, with the emphasis on storytelling from around the world. The inspiration came from the top, as Elliott recounts, when chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent charged his marketing and communications executives to refresh the company's old employee magazine, Journey, which ran from 1987 to 1997, for the digital age.

Having spent 2011 celebrating Coca-Cola's 125th anniversary, they were inspired to tell the forward-looking journey of the Coca-Cola company's multitude of brands in a more engaging, digital fashion — taking a page from Journey to reimagine the company's online and digital presence in a fresh, more engaging way that incorporates social media and blogging from around the world. The relaunched website (its first relaunch since 2005, after being launched in 1995) is described by NYT's Elliott as "the company's most ambitious digital project to date" for good reason.

Ashley Brown, director of digital communications and social media for the company, walked Elliott through what's new on the more editorially-focused website, which creates, aggregates and curates content while maintaining the core functions of a corporate website (careers, investor relations, press releases, executive bios). It's not just content marketing, either, with a focus on original content that's not just self-promotional.

Brown says the goal is to spark a debate, and host differing points of view, while showing the totality of Coca-Cola in a way that surprises and establishes a lively brand voice, one that Brown says had to be created "from scratch" with this launch. So how would he sum up that voice, as expressed through the new digital home of the Coca-Cola brand? "Smart, fun and fearless" — not exactly words you'd associate with the world's biggest brand. And that's the whole point.Continue reading...

In a serious challenge to Amazon's latest Kindle moves and Apple iPad, Barnes & Noble has introduced the two newest tablets in the NOOK family of e-readers: NOOK HD ($199) and NOOK HD+ ($269). The New York Times sees B&N positioning the first HD Nook tablets as "iPad Lite," and call the retailer's new "video service for the Nook color devices similar to the iTunes store and includes movies and TV series from Disney, Viacom and Warner Brothers."

According to B&N's press materials, NOOK HD is "the lightest and highest resolution 7-inch HD tablet ever. NOOK HD+ is the lightest Full HD tablet with a brilliant 9-inch HD display that magazine and movie lovers will adore. Enjoy incredible reading and entertainment like never seen before – all starting at just $199."

They're available for pre-order at nook.com and in-store on Nov. 1st; AP took a look at how they stack up here.