Ikea to Unveil Catalog With Interactive Features

It is unlikely that Ikea could alert shoppers to its increasing digital presence by changing its name to iKea, trademark laws being what they are. Perhaps the next best thing is what the Ikea United States division plans to announce on Monday: an initiative centered on what executives call their first interactive seasonal catalog.

The 31-page catalog, known as Celebrate Brilliantly, is being introduced in time for Thanksgiving and the Christmas shopping season. It can be read and watched on a section of the Ikea U.S. Web site, ikea-usa.com/celebrate.

Why “watched” in addition to “read”? The contents include video clips as well as integrations with Ikea's presence in social media like Facebook and Pinterest. Other interactive elements include a feature to change the furniture and accessories in a photograph by using a mouse to “pull down” a virtual window shade.

“Over the last several years, we've continued to try to see which space our consu mers are in,” said Christine Whitehawk, communications manager at Ikea U.S. in Conshohocken, Pa. “Like other retailers, other advertisers, we're realizing they're more and more involved with digital.”

Ikea U.S. has had “an online version of our print catalog for several years, but it's basically a PDF version,” she added, so having the interactive catalog adds the benefits of being “able to monitor how people respond, the areas where they don't respond, and look at how they're using it, how many are using it and how it gets shared.”

The catalog is being produced by the Brownstein Group in Philadelphia, an agency that has worked with Ikea U.S. since 2006 on retail-oriented advertising assignments that run in traditional as well as digital media. Plans call for three additional seasonal catalogs next year, Ms. Whitehawk said.

The catalog will be promoted through methods that include e-mails to customers in the Ikea U.S. database and an online ba nner ad campaign, she added.

About 11 percent of the Ikea U.S. annual advertising budget is being spent on the initiative, Ms. Whitehawk said. According to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP, Ikea U.S. spent $101 million to advertise in major media last year.

Racing to the Screening Room to Outpace Oscar Rivals

LOS ANGELES - For those who have wondered how Hollywood's studios will get their latest-released movies seen by thousands of awards voters before the unusually early onset of Oscar voting on Dec. 17, Universal Pictures has an answer: blitzkrieg.

On Friday, Universal's publicity team circulated word of a lightning strike by its “Les Misérables,” which opens in commercial theaters on Christmas Day, with a series of six Los Angeles-area screenings in about eight hours on Nov. 24. The film's director, Tom Hooper, will attend all of them - and this, after he executes a similar maneuver in New York on Nov. 23, where the screenings cluster in more manageable Manhattan.

In theory, it can be done. But based on close inspection of his Los Angeles stops, it appears that Mr. Hooper will cover more than 45 miles on busy surface streets and freeways, just as Christmas shoppers hit the roads.

According to Universal's plan, Mr. Hooper, who won an Oscar in 2011 for d irecting “The King's Speech,” will start the workday at noon by introducing his new movie at a theater in Hollywood.

An hour later, he should be at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in the San Fernando Valley, some five miles away (with a driving time of nine minutes, by an optimistic estimate on Yahoo Maps), to introduce the film again.

Then it's off to Santa Monica - 18 miles, and 24 minutes, away, as the limo flies - for a question-and-answer session where “Les Misérables,” which has a running time of well over two hours, will have begun screening at noon.

There's another showing, with an introduction by Mr. Hooper, in Santa Monica at 4 p.m. That should leave time for an 18-mile drive back to the valley, to introduce a 7 p.m. screening at the television academy.

Then, Mr. Hooper can backtrack to Hollywood, five more miles, in time for another Q. and A., at a screening that will have started at 5 p.m., and should be wrapped by abo ut 7:30.

It should work out fine. Unless, of course, Mr. Hooper collides along the way with filmmakers behind the Weinstein Company's “Django Unchained,” Sony Pictures' “Zero Dark Thirty” or Warner Brothers' “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”

All have release dates in mid-to-late December, and will soon be fighting for attention as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, begins a nominating vote that in the past did not start until much closer to the month's end.

Divining Music Fans\' Habits

With the growth of streaming music services like Pandora and Spotify, which let people listen to millions of songs free or by subscription, a critical question for the industry is how these habits will affect users' spending and listening habits. Yet the more the issue is studied, the more complicated the answer.

Last week, the NPD Group, a market research firm, said that the growing popularity of streaming music was cutting into the amount of time that listeners spent with CDs and downloads. Among Pandora fans, for example, the number of people also listening to CDs and downloads has dropped 21 percentage points since 2009, the study said.

A few months ago, however, NPD reported that Pandora users bought 29 percent more music than they did last year. At first glance these findings would seem contradictory. But Russ H. Crupnick, an NPD analyst, said they revealed that Pandora users might be spending more money on CDs and downloads but listening to them less.

Music industry experts are divided on the larger question of whether streaming services cannibalize music sales. But there is a growing sense that instead of having one answer to that question, there are several, depending on the type of consumer.

Last year, NPD and the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, an industry group, found that when people had access to music anytime - through a streaming service, for example - additional spending by average fans fell much more than among the most passionate ones.

(Average fans, or “converts” in the study, are defined as “good listeners, but modest spenders,” and make up 35 percent of the marketplace; the biggest fans are only 10 percent of the market but account for almost half the spending.)

“If you are an average music fan, there's a higher chance that listening will just lead to relistening,” Mr. Crupnick said in an interview last week. “On the other hand, if you're a superfan, ther e's a higher probability that discovery will lead to a purchase.”

These patterns have been changing quickly, though, and the studies may already be out of date. The merchandisers association's study with NPD, for example, was based on a survey in August 2011, barely a month after Spotify was introduced in the United States. Since then, Spotify's subscriber ranks have more than doubled.