Articles of the Day
IAB Issues Final Word On Rich Media Impressions - The Interactive Advertising Bureau has issued final guidelines on how to count rich online media ad impressions in a world increasingly powered by AJAX and other auto-refresh technologies.
IGA Worldwide Gets Into Casual Games - New York-based in-game ad firm IGA Worldwide has begun its push into the casual game space, announcing an exclusive partnership with Merscom to place ads directly into its suite of casual games.
Searching to the Nth Degree - How many home runs were hit by the Baltimore Orioles between 1953 and 1959? Google has its strengths, but answering such precisely worded queries isn’t yet among them.
E-Mail Usage High, Marketing Spend Low - More than one-half of US e-mail marketing executives get 20% or less of their firm’s e-mail budgets, according to StrongMail Systems and JupiterResearch’s “Maturation of Email: Controlling Messaging Chaos Through Centralization” report. E-mail marketers appear to get shortchanged when it comes to e-mail budgets, especially considering the medium’s wide usage. JupiterResearch found more than one-quarter of the e-mail that consumers received in their inboxes was marketing. But there are reasons why e-mail spending growth will stay moderate in the short term.
Shoppers Look to User Reviews, Search - US online shoppers researching products are turning to user reviews more than expert reviews, according to a study by Avenue A | Razorfish. More than one-half of online shoppers doing research said they consulted user reviews most often. User reviews still trail some other information-gathering methods, with search being the most notable. However, consumers do not have to do much research for well-known goods before heading to a Web site to make their purchases.
Colleges Form P2P Activist Groups - The Recording Industry Association of America better watch out: a new kind of fraternity is popping up at college campuses that advocates looser copyright law restrictions and free information exchange over the Internet. Called Students for Free Culture, the group has chapters at more than 35 colleges across the country. “We will listen to free music, look at free art, watch free film and read free books,” reads the manifesto from its Web site, freeculture.org. “We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism.”
Experts: GoogleClick Should Pass - Antitrust experts tell Reuters they expect Google’s $3.1 billion DoubleClick merger to soon be approved by the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates mergers and acquisitions, despite opposition from Google competitors Microsoft and Yahoo. Both Mark Kovner, a lawyer, and consultant Steven Sunshine believe the acquisition will go through because advertising is still a huge market with many competitors.
National Advertisers Behind The Digital Times - We are knee-deep in the digital revolution, yet marketers are still having trouble making the transition. A new study from consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in conjunction with the upcoming Association of National Advertisers conference reveals that interactive marketing still lags badly behind consumer behavior. The Web has become an essential part of most consumers’ lives–eight in ten Americans are online, and usage is nearly parallel to that of television, yet marketers on average allocate just 5-10 percent of their ad budgets to digital media.
The Ramifications Of A Poor Web Infrastructure - In a CNET column, Michael Kleeman, a UC San Diego senior fellow, warns against the need for repairing the existing Internet infrastructure. If the information superhighway were as visible as a road system, he says “it would appear to be excellent in some places, but riddled with potholes in others; heavily congested at many times and locations; and in need of massive redesign.” The problem is pure supply and demand: there’s not a great enough supply of bandwidth to keep pace with the growing number of requests for large files delivered over the Internet.
