Marketing Blogs Get Honors

MarketingSherpa's reader poll to determine people's favorite marketing-oriented blogs came out this morning, with AdRants, AdLand, CanuckFlack, Dana's Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Search Engine Lowdown and Strategic Public Relations winning top honors in the various categories. MarketingVOX managed to nick... continue reading »

New Tool Lets Publishers Auction Demos

Poindexter launched an inventory management system that allows publishers to create eBay-style auctions for batches of inventory that can be divvied up by time and demographics. The new Progressive Optimization Engine 3.0, already in use by at least one large... continue reading »

Advergames Find Surprising Audience: Women

Contradicting stereotypes, many women are playing games online, a quarter of them even late at night, between midnight and five a.m. But the games they play are a little different from the most popular among men. According to one research... continue reading »

Calls to Compete with Clicks

More and more search and text ad marketers are hoping viewers will give them a ring rather than a click. Companies like Ingenio and eStara are developing businesses selling calls directly to marketers' inbound marketing centers. Ingenio just announced a... continue reading »

'Worst Ad Ever' Makes Cyber Lion Top Ten

MSN is milking its sponsorship of the Cyber Lions by releasing the top ten online ads of the year one at a time. Starting off its top-ten list is "The Worst Ad Ever," a viral spot done for U.K. food... continue reading »

Online Retail Sales Up 23 Percent for Week

Continuing the trend, the week ending May 23 racked up double digit online retail spending growth, accounting for $1.08 billion in sales, 23 percent higher than the same week last year, according to comScore. No week in 2004 has yet... continue reading »

Moratorium Urged on Tween Marketing

A public interest group fired off a public letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FCC) today, asking that it use its subpoena power to get access to marketer research studies to help determine if - heaven forefend - online data... continue reading »

Google Finds Itself the More Foreign

Google faces challenges bringing its signature search services to people internationally, especially in China's not particularly open markets. In many nations, Yahoo and other older portals have locked up the most attractive local media alliances, although Google still seems to... continue reading »

LookSmart Tries to Upset Search Loyalty with Affinity Marketing

MediaPost: LookSmart/UC Berkeley Bow Affinity Search Go Golden Bears Like credit card companies have done in printing a picture of the old college quad on Visa cards, at least one search engine company is now looking to university boosters and other groups... continue reading »

SEO Contest Tests Ability to Game Google

An "SEO Challenge" attracted more than 1,000 would-be search optimization hopefuls to a contest to see whose site could become the top Google listing for the nonsense phrase "nigritude ultramarine." SearchGuild, a contest sponsor, said that the contest came about... continue reading »

S&P Warns on Google's Growth Prospects

A study by Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services found what everyone else already knew: that Google's share of the search market is nigh on 50 percent, and trouncing Yahoo and Microsoft to embarrassment. But Standard & Poor's drew from... continue reading »

Spam Levels Off

Robbed of their second favorite past time, spam filter companies can no longer shout to the hills that the proportion of spam in email is growing, as spam levels are essentially remaining the same. Postini and Brightmail may disagree on... continue reading »

Business Blogs on CIO Radar

CIO published a review of the growing trend of corporate blogging, noting that some blogs are even becoming, dare we say it, money making. Blogging for business remains a slightly fuzzy topic because it consists of several radically different types... continue reading »