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Industry Buzz & Snippets: 8/28/08


He Twitters, all right

Agencies and Marketing Execs:

  • Ex-strategic services director Kara Trivunovic of Premiere Global Services launched The Email Advisor, a marketing firm focused entirely upon email. So far it has one client: Email Data Source, Inc.

Biz Buzz:

  • Audi believes more aggressive ad spend will leverage its brand against rivals, which have cowered in the face of a weak economy.
  • Dell is launching a set of desktop and notebook PCs targeting emerging markets. They are intended for small-business users.
  • Ipsos has acquired Alfacom, a Brazilian firm specializing in CRM in the automotive sector.
  • Eqal, the digital studio responsible for Lonelygirl15 and KateModern, is preparing a new original series, LG15: The Resistance. Expect its debut in mid-September.

Legal, Government and Regulation:

  • A Florida-based advertiser is suing Microsoft under grounds it was charged for fraudulent clicks.
  • This iPhone ad was yanked off the air by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority, which argued the spot erroneously suggests "all the parts of the internet" are available on iPhone.
  • Microsoft has won $21 million in a case against Immersion, which purportedly owes Microsoft for the settlement of a major patent infringement claim brought in 2003.
  • A federal court in California threw out a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by IO group against Veoh Networks. YouTube applauded the judge's decision.
  • Target settled with the National Federation of the Blind, agreeing to fork over $6 million because blind users were unable to navigate its online site.

Music:

  • Vancouver-based Hip Digital Media has partnered with UK-based Nectar to launch the Nectar Digital Music Store. Over one million songs, including mainstream hits, are available for sale in MP3 format — meaning users can share the tracks freely and play them on any music device.

Mobile:

  • Specs of the anticipated T-Mobile phone, built on Google's Android OS, are now available. The unit was dubbed G1 and looks a great deal like a T-Mobile Sidekick.
  • AT&T debuted two new international data plans for iPhone. Both options are costly: $120/month for 100 megabytes or $200 for 200 megabytes — and can be canceled at any time, but users that opt in for just a week will nonetheless be charged for a month's worth of service.
  • The Mobile Marketing Association has published a mobile search white paper, which can be downloaded here (pdf).
  • mPoria launched GoMobile! Lite (GMLite), a mobile-commerce service targeted to small retailers.

Publishing:

  • Heavy.com is going into professional editorial content, beginning with an offering called The Heavy Hit List — a series of countdowns designed as conversation pieces for men. The effort is sponsored by Heineken Light.
  • The New York Time's online ad revenue is not what it could be. It increased less than 1 percent — 0.9 percent, to be exact — from June to July.
  • This week AMC filed DMCA takedown notices with Twitter, demanding that users posing as characters from its TV series Mad Men be removed from the site. Deep Focus, AMC's digital marketing agency, convinced the network the characters are good for business. The accounts have since been put back online.
  • Israel plans to display the Dead Sea Scrolls — 2000-year-old documents containing the earliest known copies of almost all of the Hebrew Bible — over the internet. The collection has only been photographed once in the past.
  • Major League Baseball plans to advertise the playoffs by blogging.

Search:

  • Microsoft was crowned top display advertiser in June. It turns out many of those ads were for Live Search.
  • Ask.com launched Ask Kids, a search engine that helps children find homework help and various forms of entertainment. Search results are "graphically vivid."

Social Networks:

  • YourListen.com, a social platform for sound files, has gone live. The Epic Way site hosts interviews, TV/radio sound bites, movie effects, audio blogs, audio books, voice mails, and virtually any other recorded din.
  • Facebook hopes its new Engagement Ads system, which in the future will enable users to peruse retailer discounts and pass them to friends, will be more successful than the stigma-ridden Beacon.

User Experience:

  • Career Builder launched an ad-supported online education site, CBInstitute.com, targeted to young job-seekers that need career planning assistance.

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