San Diego Ad Club

The San Diego Union-Tribune will convert its page width to 44 inches from the current broader page size. Mark Ficarra, vice president of sales and marketing, said in a recent letter to advertisers that the 44-inch size is rapidly becoming the industry standard for all newspapers, large and small.
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Also from the U-T:
-- After a 15-year hiatus from the paper, while he was editor of San Diego Magazine, Tom Blair has returned as a columnist. Blair’s column will appear on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Diane Bell, who became the paper’s columnist when Blair left, will continue her column on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
-- The weekly Spanish-language Enlace is expanding with Enlace Extra, a weekly publication to feature event listings and entertainment information for the San Diego region with distribution to 100,000 upscale households in Tijuana. Rita Jurczyk, director of major media sales, said market research found that people cross the border into San Diego for two major reasons – shopping and recreation.
-- Chris Reed’s “America’s Finest” blog “is on hold while the U-T determines its online strategy going forward for its opinion content,” Chris recently said in a post.

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Mires+Ball was recently featured in a San Diego Metropolitan article. Manny Cruz wrote the following:

When Taylor Guitars was about to launch its Thinline Five-Way (T5) electric guitar, its longtime brand design firm, Mires+Ball, faced a big challenge. How does a company synonymous with quality acoustic guitars move successfully into the electric market?

The answer, according to a case study performed by Mires+Ball, was to focus on Taylor’s history of technical innovation. “We positioned the T5 as an inevitable extension of the Taylor brand,” the study said. “Then, to attract a younger demographic, we gave the T5 a more electrified personality and devised a strategy to generate buzz.” That included product teasers and promotions and what the company called the “creative use of the Web.”

The end result was the most successful product launch in Taylor’s 31-year history and one of the most successful launches in the electric guitar industry.


Scott Mires, partner and creative director of the agency — a title he shares with co-owner John Ball — could be called a branding genius, judging from the success the agency has had with its many clients, including such top names as Black & Decker, LA Gear, Starbucks, Nike, Hewlett Packard and Qualcomm Inc.


Mires believes branding is much more than the definition offered by the dictionary. “To me,” he says, “branding is that thing that is the gut feeling you have inside about a product or a service or a company. And so as a consumer out there, it really brands it inside the consumer’s mind.”

Read the entire article: http://sandiegometro.com/2010/06/branding-by-design/

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Fox 5’s morning news anchor Arthel Neville has returned to the Fox News Channel. Arthel, the daughter of Art Neville of The Neville Brothers, is doing some substitute hosting, along with appearances on “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Fox & Friends.”

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General Manager and Vice President Richard Doutre Jones has left XETV Channel 6 after nearly nine years with the station, according to news reports. He came to XETV from KBHK in San Francisco in 2001. In 2008, he oversaw XETV’s network affiliate switch from Fox to CW.
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