Despite increased optimism about the economy, the social media landscape indicates that we are in a similar place to where we were this time last year.

When it comes to alcoholic beverages, there will still be a good amount of holiday cheer in the coming months.

As American consumers get set to buy nearly 600 million pounds of candy this Halloween, they are choosing fewer store brand or private label sweets, opting instead for brand name treats.

It’s official now that we are in a recession, one that has been particularly tough on the retail sector because consumer spending is the lowest it has been in years. However, these past few weeks we have seen a surprising uptick in traffic across the sites we track in our Nielsen Online Holiday Shopping Index.

With curtailed consumer spending widely forecast this holiday season, retailers might be expected to concentrate their TV ads on hard-hitting sale messaging aimed at price-conscious viewers.
But according to an analysis of the most effective holiday retail TV ads, released Tuesday by Nielsen IAG, retailers did not appear to increase the proportion of promotional ads in the mix this year. 
About half of all TV ads so far this holiday season (Nov. 17 – Dec. 14) have been brand-focused, while the other half have been devoted to sales/price-focused messages — as was the case during the 2007 …

Among the top computer and consumer electronics websites for November, computer giants Microsoft and Apple easily drew the largest unique audiences, according to Nielsen Online. 
Visitors to Apple’s site logged the longest average stay-times.

Rank
(by UA, Nov. 2008)
Top 10
Computer & Consumer Electronics
Web Brands:
Nov. 2008
Unique Audience:
Nov. 2008
(in 000s)
Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss)

1
Microsoft
95,543
0:45:44

2
Apple
52,909
1:12:27

3
Adobe
29,472
0:05:19

4
Hewlett Packard
23,435
0:09:58

5
Best Buy
22,138
0:11:28

6
Flickr
19,304
0:09:06

7
CNET
17,935
0:06:23

8
Dell
17,058
0:18:38

9
Circuit City
16,609
0:08:18

10
Mozilla
14,400
0:02:23

Source: Nielsen Online (November 2008 ).

Note: Web properties reported at either the brand or channel market level and can include multiple URL’s.

Ken Cassar & Pete Blackshaw
A lot of folks have seen the Black Friday and Cyber Monday releases that we’ve put out, but we’ve also been tracking Web traffic on a daily basis – in total, by category, and by retailer since the Monday before Thanksgiving. Let me share a little bit more data:
Traffic was up by 10 percent on both of the high profile days, where consumers expected that they would be able to find deals. This is certainly better than some might have feared given the …

It’s time for that lesser-known American holiday tradition: the holiday food advertising bonanza — when ads for Thanksgiving staples, like stuffing mixes, pie crusts, gravy mixes, and cranberry sauces, crowd onto the media landscape.
In 2007, ad spending for stuffing mixes increased 10,800% from the late summer months (Q3 2007: $45,180) to the fall (Q4 2007: $4.9 million).
During the same time frame, ad spending on products within the Pie Crust category grew from literally nothing (Q3 2007: $0) to $3.3 million.
Meanwhile, ad spending within the Gravy Mix category grew from nothing …

Chinese are more likely to travel this week for the National Day Golden Week holiday than they were earlier this year during the Chinese New Year holiday, Nielsen reported Tuesday.
According to a survey conducted by Nielsen, six in 10 Chinese plan to travel between September 29 and October 5 for Golden Week, while just 42% of Chinese reported making plans to travel this past February for Chinese New Year celebrations.