NEW YORK, July 29 (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. is set to launch a new advertising campaign on Monday that will shift a sizable chunk of its advertising budget toward ads targeted at specific industries such as autos, retail and banking.
Some of the new ads will appear in mass-market outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times , both of which will carry full-color ads that span two pages on Monday.
But the new initiative is likely to carry outsize benefits for publications like American Banker, a unit of Thomson Corp. , Knight Ridder's Detroit Free Press and Automotive News, owned by privately held Crain Communications.
IBM does not disclose ad spending figures, but it said the new campaign would make up less than 10 percent of its total advertising budget through the end of the year, with the potential for expansion in 2003.
The company spent $314.8 million on advertising in 2001, according to media tracking firm CMR.
"The movement is from horizontal media like television, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to more vertical media categories," said John Kahan, IBM's vice president for global integrated marketing and communications. "We can dominate a particular industry publication and be much more targeted."
In addition, Big Blue can simply get "more bang for the dollars in this space," Kahan added, especially since magazines and newspapers have in general been slower to rebound from the advertising downturn than television.
The ads feature IBM's trademark curlycue e-business logo -- the company invented the phrase in 1997 for a previous campaign -- in various industry settings: a bank's customer response center, a retail outlet, a Toyota automotive plant.
Past IBM ads have brought to the fore such detailed technology subjects like Linux, the alternative operating system, and middleware, which ties together different types of software.