If both deals are inked, Virgin claims BA and AA would have nearly half of all take-off and landing slots at London’s Heathrow airport.

Credit crunching, fuel crisis laden merger talk has Branson reaching for the  back pocket to pull out an anti-trust campaign.  His  beef is with the British Airways management who see this current turmoil as a chance to secure more landing slots at its self appointed base in London Heathrow, by merging with AA and buying out Iberia

Just goes to show that turbulent times can affect market conditions not only in the short term, but does also have the effect of clearing away smaller competition from the longer term picture, like a mass cull, or ‘weeding’ as the big brands would probably not like to admit. Virgin has always, admirably championed consumer choice, over aggressive market grabbing tactics, this being the biggest thorn in BA’s side.

Price Waterhouse Coopers predict that India and not China will be the media spend darling by 2012. China’s spend is set to increase a modest 15%, whereas India goes a lot further with an impressive 19%.

This marks a shift from uncomplicated advertising, advertising drawn from bland, faceless international campaigns, into the territory we are more familiar with in the west; targeted advertising.

Smaller agencies are emerging in a largely untapped marketplace to take a stake in the territory created by this growth, but it also will lead to opportunities for western agencies more familiar with the concepts and practices of more complex campaigns.

This is quite a useful service

http://heyspread.com/

Its such a modern phenomenon, especially the friendly ‘2.0′ web phenomenon that sites are now using the word ‘Hey’ (usually with an exclamation mark) to convey a sense of friendliness and approachability. It does remind me of the simple manner of direct marketing in the 50’s - along with the pastel colours and the ‘pop out’ rosettas.

I am no cynic, but I do find it a little patronising when sites take this over friendly approach. I much prefer a sensible approach to marketing, one that thinks about (and is measured to) its audience.

Anyway, enough pontificating about shit - here’s the pixies version of Hey!

Well there is a lot of fuss about ICANN’s proposal to add unlimited domain extensions. I believe that this will have a two fold effect on current domain values.

1. Domain values of recognised extensions (.com, .uk, .de) will increase over the next few years while the companies that are building brands under .news .jobs .ebay etc are busy working their shit out, spending money promoting their new extensions etc….
2. There will come a tipping point when over 10% of direct navigation changes from searchterm.com or searchterm.co.uk to search.term (think of ebay.co.uk changing maybe to uk.ebay) . At this point, current domain brands will be big enough to withstand the change in this activity but new, younger brands will not, rendering the undeveloped, parked, low traffic, searchterm.com nearly valueless. Partly because with an increase in real estate, SEO/ppc/offline marketing will become the major factor, which requires investment, which in turn affects purchase price. Panic selling will become the norm as people try to realise the value of their big domain portfolios. Over the long term - It can only negatively effect prestige in the .tld namespace - prestige being a major valuation factor. i.e. It will be more prestigious to own .brand than brand.com.

My advice. Don’t sit on anything, build it or sell it, unless its making good money on type ins.