One new product that Unilever has begun to introduce in the United States is a brand named Simple, a skin-care line that is already sold in countries like Australia and Britain. A campaign now under way promotes Simple products as “sensitive skin experts.”

Procter & Gamble, a principal competitor of Unilever’s, started last week what it described as the “intrigue phase,” or teasers, for its introduction of Tide Pods, a one-step laundry tablet that will be promoted with a marketing budget estimated at $150 million for the first year. The “reveal phase” is to begin on Sunday, with a commercial for Tide Pods during the ABC broadcast of the 84th Academy Awards.

The growth in ad spending is “a trend we started seeing about a year ago, when the economy started coming out of its deep recession,” Mr. Steinlauf said, and “I don’t think there’s any turning back.”

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Online advertising spending will cruise past print in the United States this year for the first time, according to a new forecast by eMarketer.

Online ad spending in the U.S. grew 23% to $32.03 billion in 2011 and will grow 23.3% more to $39.5 billion in 2012, eMarketer said. That will put it above total U.S. magazine and newspaper spending, which will fall 6.1% to $36 billion this year, said the report.

Print ad spending in magazines will actually tick up to $15.4 billion from $15.3 billion, according to eMarketer. Magazine and newspaper publishers themselves enjoy rising digital ad revenue, which isn’t included in the “print” total being surpassed in this forecast. And marketers and agencies are starting to resist paying for online ads that many people never see.

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Procter & Gamble‘s storied Ivory soap saw an opportunity in post-recession frugal consumers: In an effort to save money, theydidn’t want to buy myriad soaps for different family members. So Ivory’s marketing team, lead by Kevin Hochman, general manager, decided to go back to basics in hyping the soap and launching a big brand refresh, complete with a Facebook page and spokesperson Melissa McCarthy. The message: With its gender-neutral scent, it is a great value for the whole family, and most important, it cleans. Pure and simple.

The campaign by Wieden+Kennedy to show “Ivoryisms” as “refreshingly honest product truths” has managed to move the brand forward during the recession. “People are looking for value and for both products and brands they trust,” says Ivory’s Kevin Hochman.

In fact, interactive video ads that ran on Christmas Day 2011 resulted in engagement rates six times higher than Cyber Monday, according to Web video start-up Jivox.

This coincided with serious growth in online Christmas Day sales, which IBM found jumped 16.4% year-over-year.

What explains this behavior? “We saw online consumers delaying shopping to the very last minute and retailers becoming more aggressive, with typical post-Christmas sales promotions running online on Christmas Eve,” according to Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of Jivox.

Along with retailers, the findings have implications for brand marketers, too. “For those of us in digital marketing, this has resulted in higher online ad spend as brands increasingly look to engage consumers online,” Nesamoney explained. “Also, this has implications for brand marketers that will need to plan accordingly to the evolving holiday season commerce cycle.”

In its first analysis of display advertising on the Amazon.com home page, Macquarie Group reported that CPG marketers such as Philips and Procter & Gamble accounted for the biggest share of ads during the second half of the fourth quarter, at 28%. Other top ad verticals for Amazon included media (23%) and financial services (10%). Another big chunk (28%) was dedicated to house ads for Amazon Local’s daily deals service.

Meanwhile:

Yahoo and AOL continued to show signs of weakening demand, based on home page ad trends, while YouTube remained strong and MSN had steady gains from both the third quarter and the year-earlier period.

Where is your brand advertising? And where do you find the best results?

A comScore analysis of online ad impressions from July shows CPGs have become the heaviest users of “socially enabled” ads that appear on sites outside Facebook but include “visit us on Facebook” or other “Click to Facebook” appeals to get users to brand pages.CPG marketers are 10 times more likely than advertisers to use “socially enabled” ads, which appear outside of Facebook but urge visits to a Facebook site, finds a comScore analysis.

They were 10 times more likely than advertisers generally to use socially-enabled online ads.

“In many ways the fan page is replacing the brand website as the primary destination for outbound marketing online,” said a comScore executive.

The only thing that makes me nervous about this is that it is a short-term strategy. Yes, Facebook is HUGE, but wasn’t MySpace? I worry when marketers spend all their time, energy and money building on one platform only to have it disappear a few years later. ultimately, marketers should have a diversified strategy that always includes their own brand website where they have full control on collecting data and emails.

TV Pros & Cons:

• No attention! Every day it gets easier to block commercials or simply access television content in commercial-free formats. A recent study indicated that over 60% of viewers had time-shifted some of their programming in one way or another.
• TV is expensive, even as its effectiveness wanes.
• There is now niche content to target, but less availablity to aggregate large audiences, which poaches viewers from the top of the market.

Online Pros & Cons:

• You can target audiences down to the minuatie, but do you want to? Many campaigns seek mass audiences, not niche and small.

• You’ve got to have a viral component. And to do that you have to prime the pump and leverage television. Campaigns can’t exist in an online vacuum!

• Online doesn’t offer quality videos – which could be a good or bad thing, depending on how you want your customer to engage.

• The context for online ads can be very exact, but it rarely has the same potential for emotional impact as a television event. Premiere League matches, NFL games, royal weddings and talent shows can make a brand part of a larger experience. Under the right circumstances, digital could do the same, but rarely does.

Twitter is “enhancing” its promoted tweets feature, the company announced in a blog post today, to help make sure users don’t miss promoted updates from the brands they follow.

For those brands who choose to buy into this the new feature, Twitter will place the brand’s tweets at the top of a user’s stream — only on Twitter.com for now — so that no matter when the user logs in or refreshes his or her screen, the latest update from a brand the user follows will appear at the top of the timeline. Typical tweets are easy to miss if users aren’t looking at their screen. The paid tweets will only appear once and can be dismissed from the timeline with a single click.

Twitter said it will limit the amount of ads a user may see in a given period of time, but it hasn’t settled on a specific boundary. Insiders say users could see as many as four or five ads in a session, provided they already follow the brands placing sponsored tweets.

Initial testing will include about 20 marketers, including Virgin America, Sephora and Starbucks, which will each be bidding to push their ads into a user’s timeline. That means a marketer could be bidding against no one, or against 20 other brands if there are enough users who follow that many companies.

Brands bid on a per-engagement price and only pay when the user engages with the promoted tweet — in other words, the tweet costs money only when users click, reply, favorite or retweet the tweet.

I personally think Twitter ads are quite successful. When I see a promoted tweet, it always stands out and perhaps because of the succintness, brands seem to be offering relevant and meaningful offers and information. It doesn’t seem intrusive nor does it seem to be an ad – something more intimate and in between.

Have you experimented with Twitter ads

The report, by Kantar Media, part of WPP, found that ad spending in major media in the United States in the first quarter rose 4.4 percent from the same quarter a year ago. The percentage gain is the fifth quarterly increase in a row since the end of 2009, but it is the smallest of the five.

As for the advertisers that spend all the money, Procter & Gamble led the list of the top 10, as it often does. Procter spent $719.8 million in the first quarter, the report said, down 5.9 percent from $765 million spent in the first quarter of last year.

Of the top 10 spenders, seven spent more than they did a year ago. They include the Chrysler Group, up 58.6 percent; Toyota Motor, up 30.3 percent; Ford Motor, up 27.3 percent; L’Oreal, up 14.1 percent; AT&T, up 6.9 percent; and General Motors, up 1.3 percent.

The cost of converting people to sign-up for events, purchase products and register for services decreases considerably when businesses run Facebook advertisements that target existing fans, as opposed to non-fans. Registration acquisition costs can be 44% cheaper, while event sign-ups cost 33% less and purchases are 15% cheaper to achieve.

Do your Facebook fans or non-fans seem to offer greater value?