Creative Way to Make and Recieve Payment – Cheese

nicolem — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:47:36 +0000

I came across this small article today in Canada’s National Post newspaper and thought it would be fun to post. I spend much of the time on this blog sharing all the great information I read everyday about our favorite topic—new media. So to change it up, I thought I would do something different.

As they say, a blog is for anything that you feel you want to write about. In our new economy we all need to be creative. Finding ways to barter for services in order to keep your business going is very vital for some. In this article, an Italian Bank accepts parmesan cheese: Reggiano (ahhh only the best) as collateral. How great!

Now that is creativity! Enjoy.

Best Nicole

Italian bank accepts cheese as collateral

Posted: August 12, 2009, 8:06 AM by Drew Hasselback

The vaults of Credito Emiliano SpA hold the pungent gold prized by gourmands around the world — 17,000 tons of parmesan cheese.

The regional bank accepts parmesan as collateral for loans, helping it to keep financing cheesemakers in northern Italy amid the worst recession since World War II. Emilia Romagna-based Credito Emiliano’s two climate-controlled warehouses hold about 440,000 wheels worth 132-million euros (US$187-million).

Giuseppe Montanari, 65, a cheese producer and dealer who uses the loans to buy milk, told Bloomberg News:

This mechanism is our life . It’s a great way to finance our expenses at convenient rates, and the bank doesn’t risk much because they can always sell the cheese.

So precious is the cheese that each 80-pound wheel, worth about 300 euros, is branded with a serial number so it can be traced if it is stolen. Thieves tunneled into one warehouse in February and made off with 570 pieces before they were apprehended by police. William Bizzarri, 58, who manages the cheese vaults, said:

Thank heavens we caught the robbers before they grated it.

Bloomberg News

Interactive Overtakes Newspaper Ad Spending

nicolem — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:24:53 +0000

In light of my action packed day I am going to keep my portion of this post very short. I came across some very interesting stats this morning that talk about the growth of interactive advertising. I am ALWAYS in support of integration with offline, online and in-store for all of you who will come back to me to question social media’s importance. BUT I do feel that these stats indicate that no one is in a position to ignore the power of engaging their customers online. This information comes from Online Daily Media, posted by Joe Mandese and released Wednesday by WWP—the largest buyer of media in the world. I am now reading all of my newspapers online. National Post, Globe and Mail, the NYT and Washington Post, and WSJ. Along with my twitter feeds from the likes of CNN, BBC and so many more, I can get all my news feeds quickly in real time. That, and I can control how and when I receive the information.

Enjoy the post and the stats.

Best Nicole

Interactive media will represent nearly one of every five dollars spent by marketers on media in the U.S. next year, according to estimates released Wednesday by WPP’s GroupM unit, the largest buyer of media in the world. The agency holding company’s new global ad spending forecast predicts interactive media, primarily online, will represent 17% of the U.S. advertising marketplace in 2010, up from 15.4% in 2009, and making.

That makes interactive the third largest medium in the U.S., behind television’s 44.2% share, and magazine’s 18.4% share of 2010 advertising budgets. According to GroupM’s estimates, interactive media will overtake newspaper’s U.S. advertising share this year. Newspapers, which had a 14.8% share of U.S. ad spending in 2008, will fall to a 13.6% share this year, and a 12.4% share next year. Interactive media had a 13.9% share in 2008.

Radio’s U.S. advertising share also continues to erode, dropping to 5.6% this year, from 6.0% in 2008. GroupM predicts radio’s share of U.S. ad spending will drop to 5.2% in 2010.

Out-of-home media spending remains steady at 2.7%.

While the U.S. isn’t the largest interactive media marketplace in the world in terms of penetration, it is the biggest in terms of advertising volume. While the GroupM report does not break out the components of interactive media, it estimates that marketers will spend $23.9 billion on interactive media in the U.S. in 2010, representing 39.9% of the world’s $59.9 billion interactive advertising marketplace.

The largest market in terms of interactive media penetration is the U.K., where British marketers will spend 30.9% of their advertising budgets on interactive media, followed by Denmark, where interactive media will have a 28.4% share next year. Ireland has the smallest interactive advertising penetration of any major Western industrialized nation, with a 3.0% share in 2010, up from just 1.8% in 2009.

Globally, marketers will invest 14.6% of their worldwide advertising budgets on interactive media, up from 13.2% in 2009.

GroupM Futures Director Adam Smith, the author of the new forecast, said the only other major media to increase share during the global advertising recession are TV and outdoor media.

“TV and out-of-home have both added share of global ad investment, while newspapers continue to shed a point of share a year,” he noted in the report. “It may also be the case that TV and out-of-home’s relative cheapness compared to newspapers has encouraged this, and perhaps newspapers have been less willing to flex pricing too.”

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Creative Way to Make and Recieve Payment – Cheese

Interactive Overtakes Newspaper Ad Spending