The Big Fat Marketing Blog

With video games and text messaging, regional chain Church’s Chicken is going after a young urban market. The video game promotion, a sweepstakes giving away copies of the “Afro Samurai” game with a game console, a $7,500 check and other goodies for the grand prize winner, runs until Feb. 22 and should be right in line with the young-adult demographic Church’s is trying to reach. more

E-mail may still have its place as a communications channel: Lord knows an announcement around the Penton offices that the company will start deleting e-mail older than six months to free up server space has thrown me and many of my colleagues into a contact-saving frenzy.

But that place may not be among the teenaged, according to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. more

The lesson for today is that while it’s great to make friends with a coupon promotion, you’d better realize that those friends have other friends—and they don’t mind sharing. more

Social network Facebook has disabled a Burger King app that proved to be good at getting people to give up their friends for fast food.

Facebook shut down some functions of the “Whopper Sacrifice” application, which rewarded Facebook members with a coupon for a free hamburger when they sacrificed 10 people on their roster of Facebook friends. more

Teen fans of “American Idol”, which kicked off its new TV season a week ago, will be able to get together and party avatar-style with the launch later this month of an “AI” virtual experience within the Habbo.com world.

It will be the first foray into a virtual community for the American version of the international hit TV show, says David Luner, senior vice president of interactive and consumer products for FremantleMedia Enterprises North America, the licensing division of “American Idol” producer FremantleMedia. more

Brand managers may talk about the value of online engagement, “conversational marketing” and other Web 3.0 virtues, but at least one Internet analyst firm says this will be the year they hunker down and seek proven performance on the Web. JP Morgan Securities has put out an annual “Nothing but Net” stock report for several years now, summarizing the prospects for a number of the most popular Web stocks and in the process commenting on what will do well on the Web this year.

The 2009 verdict from JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan: Search marketing will dominate the online marketing space because it’s built on a performance-based, pay-for-play model. Most of the audience-based media that have seen so much innovation in the last few years—notably social networks and Web video, but also display ads sold on the traditional cost-per-thousand basis—may be in for some lean times. more