A new president at Vladimir

No, not Putin. Vladimir Jones - the agency-formerly-known-as-Praco, today named Meredith Vaughan as president.

Agency founder Nechie Hall, Vaughan's mother, keeps the CEO title.

Vaughan had been the vice president for insight at the 38-year-old advertising and public relations company, overseeing strategic direction for clients. She's worked for Praco/Vladimir Jones since 2000.

If you're living under a business news rock, Praco, the Springs' oldest, most successful ad agency, changed its name to the more evocative Vladimir Jones on June 2.

Audi returns to Super Bowl

Audi of America Inc. will air its first Super Bowl ad in 20 years with a 60-second spot on its R8, the brand's first mid-engine sports car. The ad was inspired by "The Godfather" movie and will only run twice on television, during the Super Bowl and the following day.

The automaker's return to the Super Bowl was preceded by a year of record sales in the U.S -- it sold 93,506 vehicles in the U.S. last year, a 3.8 percent increase over 2006.

Phone book wars

Now that new phone books have hit the streets in Colorado Springs, the final numbers for telephone directory advertising are in.
Yellow Page advertising totaled 2,929 pages in the most recent Dex, Yellow Book and Verizon directories, up just 15 pages, or 0.5 pecent from the previous year. That compares with 4.5 percent growth in 2006 and 3.6 percent in 2005.
While pages in the Dex directory were up 14.3 percent to a record 1,365 this year, pages in the Yellow Book directory fell 2.3 percent to 1,132 and pages in the Verizon directory plunged 23.1 percent to 432, the fewest since 2004. Verizon's directory is now published by Idearc Media Corp.
Nationwide, yellow pages advertising revenue is growing at an average rate of about 3 percent a year with most of the gains coming online.

Springs company gets Grammy Award exposure

The term "goody bag" will take on a whole new meaning for the owners and staff of Colorado Springs-based Green Mountain Audio on Feb. 11 when the company brochure is included in the 250 gift bags given to each presenter and awardee at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. It will also get tucked into the gift bags at the Latin Grammy Awards later this year.

Green Mountain Audio (www.greenmountainaudio.com) was established in 1988 by physicist and speaker design pioneer Roy Johnson and is focused on creating "the ultimate in analog tube sound" with a two channel stereo system that includes state of the art speaker design by Green Mountain Audio. The brochure was in progress when Chae Chong (Metrotech Group LLC) heard the speakers at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He deemed them as "the best in the world." The brochure idea surfaced in late 2006 during a talk between an EVtek principal and one of their clients, "Lady J," a voting member of the Grammy Awards. Chong believes this is the first time such a brochure has been included in Grammy gift bags.

Super Bowl ad stats

With such a large captive audience, the Super Bowl has become not just pro football's biggest moment on center stage, but the advertising industry's as well. Anybody wanting to launch a national campaign puts up big cash -- $2.6 million for a 30 second spot this year -- and gets placement in the Super Bowl. It's a big swirling merry-go-round of ads. Over the past 20 years (1987-2006) there have been 221 different advertisers, more than 1,400 commercial announcements covering more than 11 hours and $1.72 billion of network advertising sales. This research by TNS Media Intelligence also shows that only two companies have placed ads in each of the last 20 years. Anheuser Busch has spent $250.8 million on Super Bowl ads in that time and Pepsi $190 million. General Motors is a distant third with an ad bill of $65.7 million over 15 years.