Toronto-based creative agency The Artist Group launched Cheek Weekly yesterday, a free online newsletter touted as a guide for ‘beauty queens, fashionistas and culture cravers everywhere.’ It drops into subscribers’ inboxes once a week with the latest in celebrity beauty and fashion trends, application tips and product reviews. Reach for the first issue is 25,000 per week with the initial list of staffers’ friends and business contacts already spreading virally to that number.

Julie Miller, agency director at The Artist Group (an agency that reps photographers, stylists, and makeup artists) and Cheek’s head of business of development, says the newsletter will take a light look at a combination of beauty, fashion and cutting-edge popular culture. Miller says her audience is North America-wide. The site will offer advertisers ‘a number of integrated and customized advertising solutions such as banners that click through to the advertiser’s site.’ Miller says: ‘We’d like to keep the mainframe more editorial but there will be other opportunities to tie into product placement and subscriber contests. We’re open ideas to how to stretch the click-through.’ Cost for these ventures varies. A vertical banner is $350 while a sponsored link combo is $650. Miller says the target market is wider than one might expect. Age-wise it runs the gamut of adults and there isn’t even the expected female skew. She says men are more interested in grooming products these days but even the ones who aren’t, will like the cultural edge.

A new U.S. study from MRI (Mediamark Research Inc.) doesn’t hold much hope for the use of SMS short code messaging to expand beyond the young demographic. Even amongst 84% of SMS users, this technology – currently being used by many marketers as a response element in advertising and promotions – is said to take too long, is a real hassle to use, hard to remember, or that they had little interest in the offers they see using SMS as a mobile response. MRI tested SMS and a new faster StarStar technique (**) with 600 adults aged 18-65+ using print, TV, and radio advertising with mobile response components. Not surprisingly, younger consumers are more adept at SMS but overall, twice as many participants – 90.8% – successfully responded using the StarStar call number (** plus a couple of digits) than were successful with the SMS text-to-number task. Other findings include:

* Respondents who prefer the abbreviated StarStar technique are, on average, four years older than respondents who prefer the SMS text-ing routine (47.2 vs. 43.2 years)
* Among all respondents who prefer the StarStar approach, 35.4% do not know how to send text messages while 77.8% of respondents who do know how to text (and 78.5% who don’t) prefer the StarStar call technique.
The study was conducted for California-based technology company Zoove Corp. (zoove.com) the company behind the StarStar system. Tim Jemison, Zoove CEO, says that the StarStar technology will transform mobile marketing by broadening its appeal to demos and increasing response rates for mobile campaigns because of its simplicity.

AOL Canada released stats in support of its annual Online Safety week yesterday and found that 22% of Canadian kids 8-12 would rather be online than outside. The poll is conducted every year by Leger Marketing has also found that:
– the average Canadian child is online for the first time at six years old, though 20% of parents say their child was three or younger the first time
– 42% of kids (8-12) want more time online
– 31% of kids spend up to two hours online, but 7% surf for more than three hours
– Online activities for this group include: playing games (85%); surfing fun Web sites (43%); chatting on IM (43%)
The study surveyed more than Canuck parents across the country, in addition to the same number of kids between 8-12 years old.

Yahoo! plans to start a country-by-country roll-out of its redesigned search advertising platform this fall. The new platform includes a campaign management app that allows marketers to launch search advertising campaigns across the Yahoo! network much more quickly and make management of those campaigns easier.
Features include an intuitive control panel, enhanced geographic targeting, fast ad activation, ad testing, visible quality index, share of clicks forecasting, and goal-based optimization.
Future versions will include additional distribution options and targeting based on factors such as demographic information or online behaviour.