Target has brought in someone with both advertising and retail experience to oversee its marketing efforts.

Mobile marketing has been the “next big thing” long enough that it almost seems like old news. Mobile advertising is projected to reach $55 billion in 2012, and has the distinction of being the fastest medium to reach $1 billion in spending; it took only five years, versus 16 years for the Internet to hit that level of investment.

Following a wild ride during Black Friday, the last month of the year in 2011 saw most retailers maintaining similar levels of promotional activities when compared to 2010. The majority of advertisers either saw slight increases in circular and page counts or stayed flat. When looking at both page counts and circular drops overall there was not much change, with a 2% decrease in number of pages and a 1% drop in number of inserts per market. 

During Lowe's annual conference Tuesday, SVP marketing and advertising Tom Lamb defined the company's target customer by first breaking down home improvement consumers into four distinct groups.

The National Retail Federation announced that it has asked the Commerce Department to delay implementation of a controversial plan to vastly expand Internet domain names, saying retailers and other businesses need more information before moving forward.

Whirlpool announced it has been named to the 2011/2012 Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) for the seventh consecutive year.

Target failed to crack a ranking of the top 10 most effective back-to-school ads compiled by Ace Metrix that was dominated by retail competitors and technology companies.

About 6.2% of 14 million mobile phone users have scanned a quick response or bar code on their mobile device, according to a new ComScore survey.

Safeway celebrated National Picnic Day on Monday by breaking the Guinness World Record for longest picnic table and debuting its new private-label brand.

HSN announced that Arthur Lewis has been appointed SVP merchandising, digital commerce, effective June 27.

Keynote Systems, which provides Internet and mobile cloud monitoring, announced that BJ’s Wholesale Club is using various Keynote solutions for optimizing the performance of its website.

With the dust settled from Target’s first-quarter earnings announcement last week, it has become quite apparent the company would not be faring well were it not for the beneficial effects of the PFresh remodeling program and last fall’s introduction of 5% REDcard Rewards.

The two initiatives combined contributed more than 1% apiece to Target’s first-quarter same-store sales increase of 2% and in essence allowed the company to avoid posting a negative comp.