February 2013 CyberSelection: AdAge

The print magazine Advertising Age has long been a bible of the advertising industry, but it is also valuable for general company research on most consumer and technology businesses. Cyber last covered the website of Advertising Age magazine (www.adage.com) back in March 2004, as a CyberSelection. I recently reviewed what I had written about AdAge.com, as it was styled then.  Things have changed in the last nine years, of course, but Ad Age has kept up with new technological and marketing techniques as the internet has matured. Its current site uses the brand AdvertisingAge on its homepage, but most places throughout the robust site, it is AdAge.

When I investigated the site again on November 30, the article "Six Things You Should Know About 'The Hobbit' Before It Explodes" was featured. The article noted that it has been nine years since the final installment of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy broke movie box office records and that a new cinematic trip to Middle Earth was now approaching in the form of "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey." Three of the six advertising-related factoids about this impending event:

• Characters from "The Hobbit" have been licensed by Microsoft to appear in Windows 8 ads in the U.S., UK, France, and Germany.
• "The Hobbit" is the first major film to use 3-D technology with HFR (high frame rate)--though only 400 cinemas in the U.S. are equipped for HFR.
• Items like "Frodo's Pot Roast Skillet" and "Gandalf's Gobble Melt" are set to appear on the menu at Denny's in a TV spot tie-in deal.

You can find lots of business and media news like this by scanning the busy homepage, which shows blurbs for five feature articles at the left, and another seven or eight leading to various columns or blogs in the center. The right column shows mostly ads, including house ads: titles and links to Related Content and Most Read stories, and links to Most Commented and Most Emailed. The left column displays an intriguing line of news "From Around the Web" that touches on advertising and marketing topics (New York Times reports that Bazooka gum is discontinuing its comics wrap after 60 years; Reuters notes  Twitter's legal battle over ownership of tweets; and Business Week discusses "The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails."

Search and Read

There is lots of material, and most of it is accessible through the simple Search Advertising Age search box at the top right of each page. Here you can search the contents of each weekly print issue of Advertising Age (back to 1992) as well as online-only content (updated each business day, back to 1995). My search for PeopleBrowser delivered a results screen with six items and included a repeat of the search statement (delicately informing me that I had misspelled the name, and completing the correct search, all within 0.14 seconds). Default order is Most Relevant, but that can be changed to Most Recent or Most Popular with a click. Facets on the left of the screen allow you to Refine Results by the Section in which they appear, Author, or Keywords that are extracted from the full stories. Each result shows a title in large font, its section label, author, date published, and a snippet with the search term(s) highlighted and about ten words before and after the keywords. There are links to More (from that section), RSS Feed set-up, and the Full Text of the article.

Even if you are not a subscriber or registrant on AdAge.com you can proceed to read the full text of articles without any difficulty--to a point. When I hit the Full Text link for the ninth time (I wasn't counting but AdAge was), a pop-up screen informed me that "visitors to adage.com can access 10 stories for free within the calendar month"--and "encouraged" me to subscribe. There are various subscription packages; the least expensive is the Digital Package at $79 per year, which provides online access to published print and online articles, CMO Strategies, podcasts, and full screen video. Access to the print is a separate fee, or you can subscribe to both.

Registration is not the same as a subscription; registration is free and brings its own privileges. You do not need to register to search or display full text items (within your subscription or monthly limit). Registering provides personalized services: you can sign up for a dozen free email newsletters, send email copies of content (if you have viewed it), participate in polls, and comment on stories.

Advanced Search

The AdAge Advanced Search screen (http://adage.com/advancedsearch) has an elegantly simple interface that uses drop-down menus to reveal sophisticated searching options. The first option defines the scope of your Search: "The entire site" is the visible default, but you can also choose from Headlines, Authors, Keywords, or Articles. Then, there is a Keyword box, where you enter one or more words. The Match box is the next option and a drop-down  "All Words" is the visible default--that's what told me I could enter more than one keyword in the box immediately above. But there are other choices:

Any words

Partial words

Best Partial words

Exact Phrase

All > Any

All > Partial

Boolean

If you don't know what some of these choices mean, just hold the cursor over that choice on the drop-down menu and a brief explanation appears. The Boolean explanation (the briefest textual explanation of Boolean I have seen in my life) indicates that AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, and parentheses may be used. Once you select an option to populate the Match box, its explanation appears in text below the box to remind you how you are searching.

You can search "All of Advertising Age" or refine to one or more Selected Sections:

AdAge.com

AdAgeChina

The Print Edition

Data Center

Encyclopedia

Madison+Vine

The Date Range criterion has a cute slider you move to specify within the last one day to the last 365 days. There are also two blank boxes to specify a Specific Range; when you click in the blank, a calendar pops up that you move forward and back like at your favorite travel site. The only problem with this is if you want a really long-ago start date. It gets tedious clicking the back arrow on the calendar.

I tried a number of rather complicated searches and had some difficulties. Where my earlier PeopleBrowser search had been interpreted, corrected, and returned results, my Boolean search for (iPad OR tablet) NOT mini also turned out to be erroneous, repeatedly reporting "1-0 of 0 results" with an empty result screen. I would have welcomed some more direction, but in-context search help is limited to what has already been described above, and the general Help page (http://adage.com/help/) covers topics other than searching. I wrote to a contact name that I found, however, and was impressed to received email back on a Sunday with the advice to use AND NOT in the Boolean search. So, if the system can correct from PeopleBrowser to PeopleBrowsr, why can't it correct from NOT to AND NOT?

Bottom Line

These quibbles aside, however, there is a wealth of information at the AdvertisingAge site, and much of it remains, after nine years, freely accessible. AdAge is an essential site to check for business history and strategy because of its rich archive of the weekly print edition and the huge amount of web-only content. Varied search options make it easy to locate articles on your topic. I am disappointed in the removal of pay-per-view access; I would prefer if AdAge had continued its former offer of single articles for $3 or less, payable by credit card, and even expanded it to a pay-for-a-day option at a rate of, say $10 per day. Still the $79 annual digital rate is lower than the digital+print of nine years ago, even while the archives have grown five times in size.

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.