Fish Factor: Seafood marketers ready to spend money worldwide to promote Alaska salmon

Alaska seafood marketers are ramping up promotions and bankrolling a global $1 million media blitz to counteract a tough sockeye salmon market.

Sockeyes are by far the most valuable salmon catch, often worth two-thirds of the value of Alaska’s entire salmon fishery, but last summer’s unexpected surge of reds left lots of inventory in freezers, and record US imports of competing farmed salmon from Chile and Norway combined with the prospect of another big run at Bristol Bay make for a sockeye sales squeeze.

Alaska’s approach will be patterned after the $1 million canned pink salmon campaign whe...