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April 2004
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ANA Comes out Against Do-Not-EmailThe Association of National Advertisers (ANA) came out against the Do-Not-Email Registry on which the Federal Trade Commission must report back to Congress this spring. The ANA told the Commission in a letter that such a registry wouldn't solve the... continue reading »ITV Tests Hope to Prove EffectivenessTelevision advertisers and media sellers are getting together under the auspices of the Association of National Advertisers to test several new interactive television media products. Billed as a means to validate several new concepts, such as addressable video advertising, the... continue reading »Trade Group Launches WeblogsThe Association of National Advertisers (ANA), will publish two weblogs. The first, called "ANA Marketing Musing," by President and CEO Bob Liodice, will contain as many as two to three posts per week on major industry issues. The second, with... continue reading »Hilfiger Launches 'Mix & Match' Net CatalogFashion Designer Tommy Hilfiger launched a new site that functions like an offline catalog, where pages can be flipped. And it goes further, providing the visitor the ability to page through various tops and bottoms to find matches that meet... continue reading »Google to Launch 'Gmail' Service, for FreeGoogle will soft launch a new email service - termed Gmail - on Thursday with just a thousand lucky invitees. The high storage service will be free to all users, taking revenues in only from advertising. Officials at Google had... continue reading »Rich Media Options ReviewedClickZ's Tessa Wegert started a multi-part series on buying rich online media. Her first installment reviews the creative options available among EyeBlaster, EyeWonder, PointRoll, Unicast and United Virtualities. ClickZ reports.... continue reading »Trade Mag April Fools RevieweCommerce Times published an April Fools sendup of a dot-com hotdog stand making a comeback. It sits atop several other improbable headlines on the site, including "Memo: Bill Gates To Sabotage Linux Using 'Time-Travel' Machine" and one indicating that Microsoft's... continue reading »Havas Consolidation Played as 'Integration'Back when Havas announced layoffs and a planned consolidation of much of its below-the-line businesses under the Euro RSCG brand, it was seen as a cutting of losses. But today's announcement of the new Euro RSCG 4D brand is being... continue reading »Kinja Launches, Lazy-Man's Blog SyndicationSo, you love blogs but have too many to keep up with, and RSS is too much of a pain for you to deal with? That's the value proposition Kinja is counting on. The new service, which went live in... continue reading »Another April Fools ReduxVirgin Atlantic used the April Fools holiday to get some "earned" PR around the world. In one release claiming the airline was going to introduce hypnotherapists on its long-haul flights between London and Sydney. Imagine, said a spokesperson, how nice... continue reading »Amazon Patents Cookies (No Joke)It sounded at first like a poor April Fools story: Amazon patents browser cookies. But running it down to the U.S. Patent Office's site proved it to be true. And even sillier, the application was made in 2000, long after... continue reading »AdSense Pricing to Reflect 'Quality'Solving the problem of different sites providing vastly different quality of clicks, Google's developed a sophisticated algorithm to match marketers to surfers. Content ads AdSense are distributed across a wide network of sites and to address quality concerns, Google has... continue reading »Spim Not a Spam-Level ThreatAnalysts doubt that spim - spam through instant messaging - will ever arise to the level of cost and annoyance as spam. Especially now that the big three of AOL, Yahoo and MSN have closed off their "buddy lists" to... continue reading »DMA Cries Wolf: Do-Not-Email Could Cost $5.8BPeter Johnson, the Direct Mail Association's (DMA's) top economist, said that the proposed Do-Not-Email Registry could cost the direct marketing industry $5.8 billion. The study projected that the list would block about 21.3 billion non-spam messages, although the study defined... continue reading »P&G Launches Anti-Traditional Media ReviewProcter & Gamble launched an agency planning review, which calls for the "redesign its media planning agencies into communications planning agencies." Acknowledging its concerns over waning audiences and increased costs of traditional media, P&G will ask agencies to re-create themselves... continue reading »Gateway Nixes Bricks for ClicksBricks and mortar computer retailer Gateway will shutter its 188 stores, but keep its online and telephone ordering systems up and running. The stores will close on April 9, only a week after the announcement. The company has been a... continue reading »Dart Motif Test Case a SuccessA Dart Motif case study showed some good results for diet company Atkins. A review of an online campaign showed the technology - a product of DoubleClick and MacroMedia - was able to reduce the time it took to tag... continue reading »ABC Promotes Kid Lineup on kids.usABC became the first of the five major broadcast networks to publish content to the kiddy Internet ghetto set up by Congress, www.kids.us. The new site will be nannied by Neustar Inc. and contain content taken from - and indirectly... continue reading »Washingtonpost.com Launches 'Homepage Marquee'Washingtonpost.com now offers its half-page ad unit on the home page of the news site. Called "Homepage Marquee," the ad unit will appear in an expanded right-hand column. Some news will also remain visible. MediaPost reports.... continue reading »Reporters Gauge Frothiness of New GrowthClickZ set a couple of reporters off to gauge the frothiness of the new Internet exuberance. In the face of $26 million VC fundings, IPOs, and double digit media spending growth estimates, some fear it may be a recurrence of... continue reading »Art of Customer Service Develops OnlineInternet Retailer published a troika of interesting stories on online customer service. Among the many things being learned in the e-commerce industry: - Many star customer service agents on the telephone fail miserably online, as they prove to be poor writers. -... continue reading »DoubleClick Victim of Mob KickbacksFederal prosecutors say that DoubleClick was the victim of a Colombo crime family mob kickback scheme, where a former office manager accepted kickbacks for hiring a mob-controlled construction firm. That firm then allegedly double-billed the Internet company and had the... continue reading »CNN: TV Viewership Leaking onto WebThe leakage of young males from TV to the Internet is getting mainstream coverage. CNN covered the Online Publishers Association's (OPA's) gleeful comments about the newly visible trend coming on the heels of Nielsen research showing that TV ratings are... continue reading »Online Casinos to Lose Portal Ad AccessIn February, more than 100,000 people searched for "casino gambling" or "gambling" on sites within the Overture network. A similar proportion probably did at Google and its network as well. If ten percent of those searchers click on ads, then... continue reading »Spyware Attacked by StateCan Can-Spam laws can Spyware? The Utah Spyware Control Act makes it illegal to install spyware without approval. The tricky part comes in attempting to identify just what "spyware" is and what constitutes approval. The definition remains pretty vague, potentially... continue reading »Privacy Advocates Shrill, Chill New Gmail ServiceIt could be quite useful if Google would keep a permanent record of everything searched and everything read in the new Gmail in boxes. Ads could become usefully relevant. But this isn't about to happen. When Google serves me an... continue reading »Bloggers Attractive Audience, Figuratively SpeakingRick Bruner makes the argument that blogging can be big business, helpfully providing a series of statistics on bloggers that could prove helpful in establishing them as a desirable audience. They spend about 20 percent more online and are more... continue reading »IntelliTXT Not New, Nor a Product PlacementThe "new" ad technology (actually implemented several times in the past six years by other companies) IntelliTXT is making journalists - a normally happy, pollyanish lot - angry by interfering in the text of their stories. The technology turns certain... continue reading »Consumer Adspend Falling to PromotionsIn a major shift of marketing dollars, consumer advertising - which accounted for about a quarter of marketing spending in 2002 - went down to only about one in six marketing dollars in 2003, according to a study done by... continue reading »Internet Third Place in Media Usage, to Exceed Radio NextA MediaPost story notes that video games are fast exceeding print media in terms of consumer usage, especially among the young and male among us, but it failed to prominently note that the Internet already exceeds all print vehicles among... continue reading »TV, Other Media Often Used as Background NoiseNew and seemingly proliferating studies show that people use more than one medium at a time, often listening to the radio while web surfing or reading in the presence of a turned on television. Which begs the question, which impressions... continue reading »E.U. Impatient on Anti-Spam LawsThe E.U. started to get tiffy with member nations whose legislatures failed to obey its mandate to pass anti-spam laws. The next step is for those countries to spend two months creating hard-to-read reports as to why they haven't yet... continue reading »Spam Hits Record Level in MarchBrightmail reported (gleefully, as it sells spam blocking services and announced an upcoming IPO) that spam hit a record level in March, attaining 63 percent of all messages. Brightmail uses the common definition of spam - undesired commercial email -... continue reading »Banner Suffers Another BlowAskJeeve's U.K. site will follow the U.S. example and eliminate banner ads. Said Chris Babayode, a VP of sales and business development said, "Banner ads dissuaded people from visiting. More people will come to our site to search and we'll... continue reading »Google's Ad Model Makes Fees Difficult for CompetitorsIn a move that suggests that Google's success in selling out its ad inventory may erode its competition's chances to keep charging subscription fees, Yahoo began experimenting with offering for free email storage space it sells for $49 per year.... continue reading »Ford UK Mounts Novel Multi-Media Product Placement CampaignIf you thought you could escape rampant product placements by reading a good book, fuhgetaboutit. The latest author to get paid for product placement in a novel is British chick-lit writer Carole Matthews. The author changed the heroine's car in... continue reading »Ford's 'Unapproved' Ad to BackfireEwww. Call PETA and fire the guy that came up with this disgusting idea. It seems to be another example of sub-viral marketing, in which companies set up their own campaigns that seem to be created by an Internet prankster.... continue reading »Google Disallows RSS Scraped RSS ScrapingGoogle has ordered Julian Bond to stop hosting a service that converts Google News searches to syndicated news feeds in RSS. Although the content for Google News is created by scraping stories from news sites, Google does not allow people... continue reading »Overture Signs Major PlayersOverture has announced deals to provide advertising and search services to CNN, ESPN, and The Wall Street Journal. All three companies will use Overture for sponsored search results and will begin using Overture's ContentMatch contextual advertising technology. As part of... continue reading »Database Savvy Leads to Personalized PublishingReason Magazine Editor Nick Gillespie asks, "What if you received a magazine that only had stories and ads that you were interested in and pertained to you? That would be a magazine that everyone would want to read." He's right... continue reading »Email Provider Spurred to Match 1Gig Google LimitSmalltime free web email provider Spymac copied Google's move to increase user accounts to a gigabyte of storage. The Apple-oriented company made the move to help gain new members and help provide more grist for its advertising, web hosting and... continue reading »Gmail, Like Much Else, an E.U. Privacy ViolationPrivacy International filed a complaint in the U.K. to attempt to spur an investigation into Google's new Gmail service's privacy practices. European privacy laws make a great many information transactions illegal - even some extremely innocuous ones - unless they... continue reading »RealNetworks' Fee vs. Free Efforts too AggressiveRealNetworks' media player may be "free," but it certainly takes some searching to find the download. It is often hidden in relatively fine print and behind offers for fee-based versions that confuse visitors. This might help explain why Real's paid... continue reading »Kanoodle Disses Google's 'Band Aid'It must be the election year, because things are getting aggressive. There's mud flying. Lance Podell, president and CEO, Kanoodle called Google's Smart Pricing a "Band Aid," and over the last two days Google and Overture have issues competing press... continue reading »Aussie Online Market on a Big RollThe Australian online ad industry is on a roll, having grown 40 percent last year to come close to hitting the quarter billion Australian dollar mark. That's about 10 percent of television billings. Big clients came from financial, technology and... continue reading »First Impression Gets Best Results, High Frequency InefficientThe first impression is the most likely to convert, according to a new AtlasDMT study. Although the results varied among advertisers and types of offers, in general the most effective ad was the one that a viewer saw first. The... continue reading »Week's Returns Show 16 Percent Hike in E-commerceThe week ending March 21 showed a 16 percent increase in online retail spending versus the year-ago period. $1.1 billion was spent online for the week, according to comScore. This upward trend flew against a headwind of a 4 percent... continue reading »March Madness Boosts Sports SitesMarch Madness cause big spikes in traffic to sports related websites, reports Nielsen//NetRatings. AOL Sports was the big winner with visits up 69 percent during the week of March 14 - the first week of NCAA tournament play - but... continue reading »Gmail Tested, ReviewedLucky guy Sean B. Palmer received one of the 1,000 new Gmail accounts from Google, and lucky for everyone else, he wrote an in-depth review of the service, describing the interface, the several innovations and even provided screenshots. It would... continue reading » |