by Ray Schultz

Better Homes & Gardens is celebrating its 100^th anniversary with a birthday cake cover—or four birthday cake covers, to be exact. 

Star chefs Carla Hall, Ina Garten, Jacques Pepin, and Padma Lakshmi each shared their recipes for their favorite special occasion cakes.

These cakes were photographed  and featured in a split run, with subscribers receiving one of the four.  

The September double ssue of BHG, out Thursday, also features a redesigned logo, a larger trim size, and modern matte paper. 

The issue contains a retrospective history, but also looks ahead with the BHG 100 list—of 100 people, products and ideas for the 21^st century. 

The brand now reaches a monthly audience of over 43 million across print, digital and social.  

Meanwhile, BHG celebrating a “new podcast "The Better Buy,” our incredible June cover with Harry Styles, thriving licensing partnerships with Walmart and Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate, and the release of a special anniversary edition of the iconic ‘New Cook Book’ later this year,” states Mélanie Berliet, SVP & group GM of Home & Design at Dotdash Meredith.

by Ray Schultz

Phenomenal Media, a media company that serves women and underrepresented voices, has acquired Reductress, a satirical women’s digital magazine. Terms were not disclosed. 

Founded in 2013, Reductress assigned itself the task of challenging the condescending tone found in women’s media and marketing. It also sought to highlight women and marginalized writers in the entertainment industry.  

Several of its former staffers have gone on to write for "Saturday Night Live," "The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon," and " Frontal With Samantha Bee.

The magazine, led by Editor in Chief Sarah Pappalardo, will publish a book in May 2023: "How to Stay Productive While The World Is Ending" (Andrews McMeel).  

Phenomenal, founded by Meena Harris in 2017, serves as a content and entertainment company, consumer brand, and creative agency, focusing on women and excluded communities.

The firm has launched the Phenomenal Book Club, and expanded into entertainment, with projects in development across film, TV, and theatre. Its brand partnerships include Netflix's "Bridgerton" and Prime Video's "The Summer I Turned Pretty.” 

With the Reductress purchase, Phenomenal says it will continue to support “bold comedic talent” across digital content, entertainment, and live events.

by Todd Wasserman 

While other forms of advertising are struggling, out-of-home advertising rose by 40.5% in the first quarter compared to the same period in 2021, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America. That comes after the category expanded by 37% in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Why? We spoke with Dan Dillon, CMO of Reveal Mobile, which provides geofencing marketing and location intelligence for marketers. Below are excerpts of the conversation, edited for clarity.

Dan Dillon: There are really sort of four flavors.

Traditional out of home is the billboard that you and I might think of as we take a road trip. It's a static, paper on substrate kind of board that doesn't change, and it's highly visible by all kinds of traffic: human motorized and pedestrian traffic.

There is also place-based out of home, which would be bus stops, subways and bus stations.

There is moving out of home, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's ads on the sides of cars and buses. It's ads inside the subway car itself, as opposed to in the station.

And then there's sort of a horizontal category that you might think of as just programmatic or digital out of home, which is a method of programmatic ad buying.

And those are really the four flavors, the three being format and then the fourth one being effectively a buying channel.

Dillon: I don't know that performance has improved, but I can tell you that it has one of the highest favorability rating across demographics.

Marketing Daily: Who are the biggest OOH advertisers?

Dillon: I can tell you that we consider out of home to be last-touch attribution -- or sorry, sort of the last-touch channel for in-store shopping and in-store dining. Consumer behavior that's out on the street that might drive you into a Panera as an example, or a pizza place.

The American Academy of Advertising has data on the largest advertisers by ad spend in terms of brand names. McDonald's, AT&T and Verizon are some of the biggest vendors. And then Netflix is increasingly in that too.

Marketing Daily: What do you predict for the future of OOH advertising?

Dillon: Really the cool thing about home is that it drives three kinds of behaviors. It drives foot traffic into stores. It drives people to take action on a website and purchase whatever they download. And the third one is that it drives people into mobile apps to buy something and to update their information, to fill out a survey or any number of other actions.

So out of home isn't just for getting people to buy the turkey sandwich on a Saturday. It's actually to drive people into all kinds of consumer behaviors. So aside from the conversion environment is the programmatic buying.

And OneScreen.ai, which is a big player in the category, just released a totally free ungated directory of all out-of-home players in the U.S market. So you can go into OneScreen's directory and look up all kinds of owners and operators, measurement companies and effectively buy programmatically through a platform like that.

So, I would say out-of-home ad buying is the next kind of frontier, and measurement remains a steady requirement across any number of those variables.