Are you looking to get your company on the Hallmark channel?  It may be easier than you may think thanks to a recent development.  The Hallmark Channel and Google announced a strategic agreement to offer advertisers access to high-quality family-friendly programming through the Google TV Ads program. Advertisers will now be able to reach even more viewers by using Google TV Ads platform to place ads on both Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel.

In November, Hallmark Channel was seen in 86 million homes across the U.S. and over the past year has consistently ranked in the top ten prime time ratings. The network will air in 2009 more than 30 original movies – its largest-ever slate. Hallmark Movie Channel broadcasts a mix of classic theatrical films, presentations from the acclaimed Hallmark Hall of Fame library, Hallmark Channel original movies and special events. Using the Google TV Ads platform, advertisers, starting in early 2009, will be able to access both networks’ national audiences and receive viewership data at an unprecedented scale. Google TV Ads advertisers – many of them new to the television medium – can then better understand what consumers are responding to and make real-time adjustments to their campaigns to maximize return-on-investment.

“Partnering with Google is a milestone for Hallmark Channel’s continued advertising success,” said Bill Abbott, Executive Vice President, Ad Sales, Hallmark Channel. “The Google TV Ads platform will allow more advertisers to access the network’s acclaimed roster of family-friendly programming – entertainment that audiences cherish during the holidays.”

Google TV Ads offers greater accountability and relevancy in advertising. With Google’s innovative targeting tools and auction-based pricing system, advertisers can find the right context and audience for their advertising message, only pay for impressions delivered to their ads, and receive digital reporting within 24 hours. Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel join Google TV Ads’ growing list of inventory partners, which also includes six networks from the NBC Universal family — Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, Sleuth, and Chiller — along with Bloomberg Television and 96 networks through DISH Network.

Twenty years ago Dan Lauer made the decision to take a leap of faith and quit his bank job. Now, at a time when his banking buddies are experiencing their worst year yet, Dan is supporting his family with the profits from a crazy idea he couldn’t get out of his head.  Dan left the comfort and security of his position as vice president of Royal Banks of Missouri to pursue a seemingly absurd passion – creating baby dolls.

Unlike most dolls that are the product of marketing and research by large toy manufacturers, Dan’s dolls were created from his childhood memories. Dan grew up in the ‘60s with sisters who drew faces on filled water balloons to make warm, jiggly babies. Dan liked the warmth and weight of the water dolls and worked to find a way to bring them to market.

After three years and 700 rejection letters from toy companies, Dan turned his dream into reality. He raised enough capital to get his idea off the ground and onto store shelves.

Dan’s invention, called Water Babies, became the second best-selling large doll of all time (behind Cabbage Patch Kids). More than 17 million Water Babies have been sold, and the dolls have been redesigned for this holiday season’s global re-launch (at Wal-Mart, Target, Toys R Us and other stores).

Water Babies have earned Classic Toy status. Moms who had Water Babies when they were young are now buying the dolls for their daughters to cherish.

While the retail community braces for flat or slightly lower retail spending this holiday season, some retailers can expect to benefit from savvy shoppers taking full advantage of credit and debit card reward programs that offer the richest earning incentives, with shopping dollars going to merchants that provide high-value offers, according to the Vesdia Corporation. A recent survey conducted by Kelton Research on behalf of Vesdia, indicates that half of shoppers this holiday season plan to use a credit or debit card that offers additional shopping incentives such as bonus points, miles, discounts or cash back. Savvy consumers are increasingly aware of the special offers available to them and intend to patronize merchants that can help maximize their spending power.

Vesdia, a company that supplies merchant-funded reward networks for credit and debit card reward programs, reports a sharp increase in consumer spending during the past nine months leading up to the holiday season for consumers using cards that offer additional rewards for shopping at participating in-store, catalog and online merchants. In a sample of more than 10 million consumers from January through September 2008, consumers enrolled in reward card programs with a merchant network increased spending by 37 percent compared to the same time period in 2007. Vesdia is predicting that this trend will continue through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, noting that consumers will strongly favor using a card that provides additional incentives for shopping with participating retailers.

“Consumers can earn double to as much as 10 times the standard reward program earnings rate by shopping at participating merchants,” explains Lars Holmquist, chief marketing officer of Vesdia. “These accelerated earnings are gained on top of the sale price or best offer that a consumer can find in-store or online.”

Merchants have long offered incentives to consumers for shopping online, but the strongest growth in spending and reward earning this year is occurring in the brick and mortar retail channel. While online merchandising is important and online shopping appeals to a large segment of the population, more consumers appear to be conducting research online and then transacting at brick and mortar store locations that offer both attractive prices and reward incentives.

Holmquist provides consumers the best advice on how to maximize holiday shopping budgets, “Before you kick-off your holiday spending, take a few minutes to learn about your credit card or debit card benefits, and use the one with the richest earning incentives. In this difficult economy retailers value customers’ business more than ever and card issuers are offering a broad range of benefits to incent cardholders to use their card versus others – this year the consumer is in the driver’s seat.”

If you are looking to target your audience closely, I’ve discovered a great tool for you! This week marked the launch of a new website, www.PersonicX.com, that allows users to learn about consumer life stage segments and to gain a better understanding of consumer attitudes, behaviors and demographics.

“PersonicX is designed to help companies locate the best prospects among all consumers and better understand their needs, desires and buying habits,” said Louis Rolleigh, segmentation product leader for Acxiom. “The new website makes learning about segmentation easy and enjoyable, and it provides resources for digging deeper as well.”

PersonicX is a household-level segmentation and visualization suite that uses analytical and mapping tools to place U.S. households into distinct segments and groups based on specific consumer behavior and demographic characteristics.

Unlike other segmentation systems, PersonicX doesn’t assume people or family groups living in the same geographical area share all the same needs or habits. With PersonicX, each unique U.S. household is “clustered” with similar households based on specific consumer behavior and demographic characteristics.

PersonicX consumer segmentation allows businesses to focus marketing resources where they will produce the greatest market penetration and highest ROI. Companies can also optimize the creation, distribution, pricing and promotion of products over time, based on their success rate with targeted segments.

“Businesses can use PersonicX to make intelligent marketing decisions to greatly improve their return on investment,” added Rolleigh. “We’re excited to provide this unique service to our customers.”

The “What’s My Cluster” feature allows users to enter demographic information and quickly see how varying characteristics such as age and home owner/renter status affect the assignment of a household to a particular cluster. A marketer can immediately see how powerful segmentation can be for better targeting and customizing messages and offers to the right consumers.

Online reviews and comments written by users are second only to word of mouth as a purchase influence for most Americans, according to a survey of web users released today by tech strategy firm Rubicon Consulting.  As part of a broader investigation into how business can exploit online community, the survey underlined the importance of online information in driving purchase decisions, but the most influential information is beyond the direct control of companies selling products and services. Courting the small fraction of Internet users who write online reviews and comments is a very important task for many companies, but one they often neglect.

“Many companies downplay the importance of online communities because only a few percent of all Internet users contribute to them heavily,” said Harry Max, a principal at Rubicon Consulting. “What they don’t understand is that most other Internet users read those reviews and rely on them heavily when making purchase decisions. Taking good care of online communities can be a huge money-saver for companies trying to get more marketing impact from limited budgets.”

The study, developed by Max and Rubicon principal Michael Mace, also confirmed the power of Most Frequent Contributors — the 9% of web users who produce 80% of all user-generated content.

The survey, conducted in September 2008, revealed other important insights about the Internet’s influence:

• The Web is the #2 resource for customer support information, after user manuals. It ranks ahead of calling the manufacturer or asking a dealer.
• Website categories that get the most daily usage are search, social communities like MySpace and Facebook, general news websites like CNN.com and NYTimes.com, and online banking.
• The websites that Americans value most are (in order), Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook. Although Yahoo’s financial challenges have generated a lot of press attention, it continues to have a very large and loyal following.
• Young people (age 22 and under) are much noisier online than their elders. They account for about half of all the content and comments posted online.
• Facebook appears to be ahead of MySpace in terms of number of users in the US, and perceived value of the site.
• Despite extensive publicity, the community sites SecondLife and Twitter reach only a few percent of US Internet users.
• Democrats are more active online than Republicans. Democrats are more likely to participate in online communities, and say they are more heavily influenced in their voting decisions by information they find online.