Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

MEL’s Database of the Week for 2/19/10

February 19th, 2010

Welcome to Database of the Week — a feature from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). These database snapshots will give you basic information about our most relevant and beneficial online resources.

This Week’s Featured Database: WARC, from World Advertising Research Center Ltd.

Link: www.lib.purdue.edu/mel, in the pull down Quick Access to Business Databases alpha list right below the Libraries’ search box.

Description/focus: WARC is a marketing and advertising information service used by media, market research, and ad agencies.

Start with this hint: When you open WARC ignore the login and password fields and just enter your search term (try twitter), and when you get a popup asking for your information, register in order to download a cookie.  Once you are recognized as Purdue affiliated and ready to search, this database has a great interface.  Click on one of the fields along the top and you’ll see the newest reports on that subject plus options for further breakdown.  For example, click on Industry sectors and see the breakdown on the left beginning with Food which is further categorized by Marketing, Case Studies, Market Overviews, Food Brand Profiles, and Iconic Brands.  Back up to the top and Consumers shows you a new report on Hispanics in the USA, plus the left side breakdown of Target Audiences (such as Ethnic and minorities), Understanding Consumers, Consumer Research, and Research Suppliers.

Why you should know this database: WARC content includes news stories, case studies, conference papers, checklists (key items to cover on marketing projects), speeches and quotes, data, scholarly journals, and WARC’s own reports, which are updated frequently.  The subjects that are covered include media research, market research, trends, best practices, and more.

How this database can be integrated into the curriculum: Using WARC is very easy to do so even students who are beginning database users should be able to find marketing or consumer information whether by drilling down through the choices or  doing a keyword search.

Cost: Paid by the Libraries annually. For more information contact mdugan@purdue.edu.

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Database of the Week comes to you from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). Our intent is to give you a brief introduction to a database that you may not know. If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact kranlib@purdue.edu. Database of the Week is archived at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/mgmt/database/. For more Purdue Libraries news, follow us on Twitter (@PurdueLibraries).

If you would like us to promote your favorite database, send an email to mdugan@purdue.edu.