What's New in Online Ads: Improvement (BusinessWeek Online, October 31st)
A two-year decline in the sector's revenues may be bottoming, thanks to better technology, metrics, and results -- and new enthusiasm.

Online Ad Gain Led by Classifieds (CyberAtlas, October 31st)
A study by Jupiter Research has pointed to the importance of classifieds - long established as a staple of print media - in driving online ad growth forward in years to come, much in the manner that paid search listings have during this and last year.

Coke Judges China SMS Campaign a Success (internet.com, October 30th)
The summer promotion is billed as the first national SMS ad campaign, as the beverage giant taps into China's huge wireless population.

BMWfilms.com Readies Motown Film Debut (internet.com, October 30th)
'Standing in the Shadows of Motown' will mark the carmaker's encore to the promotional short film series that won it acclaim on the Web.

Perfecting Paid Search Engine Listings (australia.internet.com, October 29th)
Delving into the pay-per-click search market can certainly provide web publishers and online marketers with greater control, predictability, measurability and convenience than traditional search engine optimization. Doing so, however, does not completely excuse one from optimization of landing pages, creatives and placement, as this article demonstrates.

Dynamic Logic Rolls Out Cross-Media Research Tool (internet.com, October 29th)
Building upon the recent studies it conducted for the IAB, Dynamic Logic has unveiled a new CrossMedia Research product that is aimed at proving online advertising's effectiveness.

Pop-Up Ads: More Problem Than Profits? (eMarketer, October 29th)
Even though pop-ups account for only 2% of online advertising, many net users are up in arms over their perceived intrusiveness and internet service providers are responding. Are X10 and Orbitz getting their money's worth?

CoolSavings Launches Ad Network (internet.com, October 28th)
In an effort designed to broaden the reach and responsiveness of its coupon distribution program, loyalty intermediary CoolSavings has debuted an ad network that will see independent websites rewarded for encouraging the use of its printable promotions.

The Three Biggest Ad Headaches (ClickZ, October 28th)
Bluestreak's Eric Picard takes a look at three of the biggest obstacles facing the online ad industry; those being ultra-low media rates, ad server discrepancies and cookie issues associated with the domainant Internet Explorer browser.

Does Permission E-Mail Marketing Push Consumers to Purchase? (eMarketer, October 28th)
A recent DoubleClick survey indicates that 69% of US e-mail users have made online purchases as a result of receiving permission e-mail marketing.

New Portal Asks, Who Needs Ads? (internet.com, October 28th)
One portal has found a way to beat the sluggish online ad climate: Don't take ads... at least not the types of ads drawing complaints from Web users.

Internet Media a Mixed Bag in '01 (internet.com, October 28th)
Investment firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson's annual communications industry report for 2001 shows consolidation in a difficult year but better cash flow than expected. Internet media held up over 5-year stretch.

Viewpoint: Immersive Advertising (Three Days' Worth) (internet.com, October 25th)
Here, Rebecca Lieb reflects upon the recent Jupiter/IAB AdForum, revealing the consensus opportunities and threats that face an industry still seminal in its development.

US Online Ad Spending Update (eMarketer, October 24th)
PwC and the IAB recently released an estimate of $1.46 billion for online ad spending in the US in Q2 2002. What does this mean for the market for the remainder of 2002? eMarketer makes sense of the numbers.

What Media Buyers Want (ClickZ, October 24th)
Tessa Wegert puts forth a few quick tips to publishers aimed at demystifying exactly what it is that a media buyer looks for when requesting basic information about a property.

24/7 Real Media Reshuffles Management (internet.com, October 24th)
24/7 Real Media has reshuffled its management ranks, announcing late Wednesday the departure of its president and chief operating officer, Tony Plesner, after two years with the New York-based online ad server.

FTC Settles With Spammers (internet.com, October 24th)
The Federal Trade Commission has settled charges against two individuals who used spam, deceptive earnings claims, and fictitious testimonials to sell spam e-mail lists as business opportunities. The settlements demand redress to consumers and bar the defendants from making false, misleading, or deceptive claims about their e-mail lists, software, service, marketing program, or any other business opportunity.

Loyal Site Visitors Don't Mind Ads (internet.com, October 23rd)
An Online Publishers Association study finds that Web sites' high-affinity visitors have a higher tolerance level for ads.

Beyond the Banner: Will Rich Media Win the Day? (internet.com, October 23rd)
Despite the many proclamations of its death, the banner ad keeps springing back to life. As online advertising tries to wake up from its two-year slumber, however, the banner might finally lose ground to formats offering more oomph, suggests Jupiter Research.

Online Ads to Recover (a Bit) in 2003 (internet.com, October 22nd)
Maintaining a cautiously optimistic outlook, Jupiter Research has claimed that online ad spending will make a slow but steady recovery starting in 2003, which should see spending on the medium double within five years. The report, however, claims that average CPM rates are unlikely to advance far beyond their present status, which will maintain an extended buyer's market.

Inktomi Expands Amazon Deal (internet.com, October 22nd)
Looking to recover from losing big-name partners to rival Google, Foster City, Calif.-based Inktomi (Quote, Company Info) on Tuesday scored an expansion of a deal with Amazon.com to put e-commerce results on its pay-for-inclusion search index.

DMA: Mailers Turning to Internet (internet.com, October 22nd)
Although it remains fairly immature, offline direct marketers are increasingly dabbling in e-mail - and subsequently impacting postal mail volumes. Meanwhile, the results of a new DoubleClick study back up the assertion that effective e-mail exposure can positively affect offline sales.

Marketers Try to Take the Boo Out of Halloween (New York Times, October 22nd)
For the second consecutive year, Madison Avenue is exorcising many of the spooky, ghoulish and violent elements from Halloween advertising.

Net Ad Industry Pushes For Bigger Slice of Media Pie (internet.com, October 21st)
The Interactive Advertising Bureau has rolled out a second major study showing how marketers can get better brand awareness by moving more money online. The case study in question concerns an effort by fast food giant McDonalds, who was able to boost awareness of a new product brand to a significantly higher degree when online composed a greater proportion of the campaign mix.

IAB: Web Ad Spending Falls Again (internet.com, October 21st)
Revenue for the online ad industry dropped by 4.1 percent during the second quarter, its seventh-straight quarter in decline, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. During this period, only paid search listings and niche formats grew in popularity, while CPM-based pricing again dominated transaction types.

BMW Gives New Roadster the Hollywood Treatment (Reuters, October 21st)
BMW Films.com blurred the line between entertainment and advertising when it debuted in 2001 with a series of short action films featuring BMW's cars, and was claimed to be core to the parent company's success in boosting sales that year. Now, the project is taking another lap around the Web with a new round of films directed by such luminaries as John Woo and Tony Scott.

Marketers Hit Internet Users with Pop-Up Spam? (USA Today, October 21st)
A developer of bulk-mail software has figured out how to blast computers with pop-up spam over the Internet through a messaging function on many Windows operating systems. TechTV presents more on this issue here, and an active Geek/Talk discussion about the new spam format is presently taking place here.

The Keys To Cross-Media Advertising (australia.internet.com, October 21st)
What an advertiser wants and needs to know is two things: where is the audience at any time, just as if it was like a moving target, and secondly, how much budget should be apportioned to one medium over another. Building upon the notions put forth in this article, internet.com's CyberAtlas presents an analysis of the results of recent studies into media mixing for the multicultual (US) marketplace, indicating how different cultures use media in this article.

AOL's Internet Lite: Will Advertisers Bite? (ClickZ, October 18th)
It's a case of role reversal in the media world these days. Not only are television stations dabbling in digital overlays, message crawls and other web-inspired formats, but online publishers are making a concerted effort to regress to a middle-point in which traditional advertising metrics are promoted above those that make the interactive market unique. Case in point is AOL's newest release, which seeks to define audiences and content in television-like terms.

NYTD's Ad Renewals up 70% (internet.com, October 18th)
Could NYTimes.com be leading a recovery in the depressed online advertising marketplace? Total advertising sales in the online division of The New York Times Co. are reportedly up by 30 percent as of the end of September, the company said during a third quarter earnings discussion. So far this year, advertising renewals on the site are being made at a rate of about 70 percent.

Opt-This, Opt-That: Putting Permission to Rest (ClickZ, October 18th)
With confusion and debate continuing to surround the precise definitions of opt-in, opt-out, double opt-in and other forms of collecting permission or building lists for email marketing, Edward Crossman takes a valiant stab at the issue by attempting a definitive segregation of the terms used in this market.

Time for More Targeted Advertising? (ClickZ, October 17th)
This article looks at the many significant demographic and psychographic criteria that online media buyers may establish in the targeting of a banner campaign, while asking whether room for improvement - mainly in relation to the offering of units that more closely gel with offline counterparts - remains. Central to this article in particular is talk of 'Dayparting', or targeting by time-of-day, which has gained increased attention of late.

Perfecting Paid Search Engine Listings (SearchDay, October 17th)
With an increasing number of online marketers coming to realise the value of including the pay-per-click search engines as a component of both direct-marketing and branding buys, effective listing strategies become all the more valuable in giving a buyer an edge over its competition. This article presents a series of tips and tricks concerning how your company can save substantial time and money in managing paid listing campaigns.

Interpublic Group Surprises Wall Street With Another Warning (NY Times, October 17th)
Agency giant Interpublic, which had previously warned of earnings disappointments and accounting irregularities, has disclosed additional financial shortfalls and continuing ad market woes.

Broader Is Better in Google and Overture (ClickZ, October 16th)
Kevin Lee looks at a pay-per-click search engine buying strategy that can help advertisers to avoid bidding wars on popular terms, while avoiding the dilution of the core goals of their campaign.

NetCreations Dives Into Append (internet.com, October 16th)
NetCreations is the latest major player in the e-mail list management business to explore the controversial practice of "append"ing email lists with databases of customers' personally-identifiable offline data.

Relevance of Game Theory To Advertising Sales (australia.internet.com, October 16th)
Game theory is able to explain how media companies compete for advertising dollars.

From Dazzle to Daily (ClickZ, October 15th)
As the Internet becomes less of a toy and more a part of people's daily lives, the tone and placement of your advertising should shift accordingly, suggests Seana Mulcahy in this article.

Consumers Favor Companies with Good E-Mail Marketing (eMarketer, October 15th)
A Quris survey determines that 67% of consumers say they like the companies that they think do a good job with permission e-mail marketing. Further data on how the quality of online marketing and CRM efforts have an effect on loyalty, open rates and brand favorability, are explored within this article by internet.com.

What Is the Internet Audience Worth These Days? (E-Commerce Times, October 15th)
Even its boosters admit that targeted marketing will replace only a portion of revenue lost amid the overall online ad spending slowdown, as discussions concerning the value of the online audience continue to stir up debate.

AAAA to Take Up MediaPort Effort (internet.com, October 14th)
The American Association of Advertising Agencies will pick up the process of hammering out XML-based standards for ad buying, selling and trafficking from now-defunct startup MediaPort. New York-based MediaPort, which shut its doors earlier this year, had planned to spearhead the effort to create electronic standards for the entire advertising process, for all forms of media.

Step Into the Stream (ClickZ, October 14th)
This article sets out to explain why streaming media advertising has yet to gain the foothold long-promised by rich-media proponents, and how it may in fact achieve such stature once creative personnel start to accept that media with which one can't interact is likely to be less popular than interactive counterparts when set within the context of the net.

U-Haul, 1-800 Contacts Join Anti-Pop-Up Bandwagon (internet.com, October 14th)
Two more companies are taking their complaints against scumware firms and their advertisers to the courts, as pressure increases to ban their predatory and anti-competitive marketing practices.

24/7 Real Media Releases Open Advertiser in U.S. (internet.com, October 11th)
Online media player and marketing technology provider 24/7 Real Media is set to challenge DoubleClick in the market for hosted ad management systems that support both multiple advertising and multiple publishing clients with the U.S. release of its Open Advertiser product.

Why Buy Name-Brand Sites? (ClickZ, October 11th)
In a finding that will come as no surprise to those involved in traditional brand advertising for any length of time, ClickZ' Pamela Parker gives a sneak-peek into a new report published by the Online Publishers Association, comScore, and Millward Brown that suggests tangible benefits are found in buying media on sites whose audience has strong connections to the property; where this loyalty can bleed into the relationship between said users and the companies that support the publisher.

infoUSA to Acquire ClickAction (internet.com, October 10th)
The database software provider said it will spend $4.1 million for ClickAction's e-mail client base and use it for marketing purposes.

Weight Watchers Files Second Pop-Up Suit (internet.com, October 9th)
Just days after filing suit against a Floridian pharmaceuticals company for allegedly posting unauthorized pop-up ads for diet drugs on the Weight Watchers Web site, Weight Watchers International has initiated legal proceedings against the scumware plays it alleges are responsible for selling the ad space to the Weight Watchers competitor without permission. This marks the third high-profile case active against The Gator Corporation (one of two defendants named in the second suit), with previous action being launched by the UPS and a group of large online news publishers. Active discussion about these suits may be found within this Geek/Talk thread.

Avesair Debuts SMS Ad Server (internet.com, October 8th)
Wireless ad server Avesair is taking the wraps off its flagship offering, with a product that aims to make marketing in the emerging mobile arena function similarly to e-mail.

WorldCom Out of AOL-TW Ad Deal (internet.com, October 8th)
A bankruptcy judge in New York approves the bankrupt telco's bid to cancel $182.3 million in advertising commitments to AOL Time Warner. This is the latest in a series of blows suffered by the media titan amidst a deep online advertising recession.

Buy Boosts Terra Lycos' Targeted Ad Technology (internet.com, October 7th)
Adding a suite of data mining and analysis tools to its marketing arsenal, the acquisition of online direct marketer GetRelevent by Spanish web publishing and ISP giant Terra Lycos promises to present the firm's customers with increased targeting capabilities, and improved reporting upon patterns of activity. The private firm was purchased via an all-cash transaction, and it is expected that Terra Lycos will maintain and expand upon GetRelevant's existing network, as well as incorporating the companies technology into its own product range.

comScore Bows Hispanic Web Measurement Service (internet.com, October 7th)
Continuing efforts by Internet marketers to capitalize on the growing Hispanic presence on the Web, comScore Networks unveiled a new service designed to better measure the demographic online.

Keyword Banners: More Effective and More Complicated (ClickZ, October 3rd)
ClickZ' Tessa Wegert looks at just how the market for keyword-based banner buys has changed over the past few years, and how an increase in demand (driven largely by the logic that search-based buys have proven some of the most effective in terms of return on advertising) has made the process of finding a suitable buy all the more complex.

Information Inundation (E-Commerce Guide, October 3rd)
Good promotion gets your name 'out there' but how much is too much? And when do the attempts to connect with your audience become more annoying than effective.

UPS Sues Internet Ad Company (SiliconValley.com, October 2nd)
Joining an ever-expanding list of companies angry at the way parasiteware distributor Gator Corp. does business, the United Parcel Service has taken the firm to court, seeking an injunction and unspecified damages in reaction to Gator's software popping unsolicited and unapproved ads in front of UPS' site (including some for chief competitor FedEx). This follows a successful injunction being granted to the NY Times and other publishing plaintiffs in an earlier case against Gator, which is still on-going, and a growing movement within independent publishing ranks to educate the public and policymakers about Gator's unsavoury practices. More on the UPS lawsuit is noted within this IAR article and this Geek/Talk discussion thread.

Media Buyer's Guide to Search Advertising (ClickZ, October 2nd)
If you are at an agency or are an in-house media planner/buyer, chances are you've added search engine marketing to your online plans. As a media buyer, you approach search marketing from a unique perspective, defining search traffic as media. Knowing the ways pay-per-click (PPC) search media is unique, particularly in comparison to other types of online media, will help you plan and execute a search engine listings campaign effectively.

AG Files California's First Spam Lawsuit (internet.com, October 2nd)
Demonstrating a determination to no longer allow spammers free reign insofar as the distribution of unsolicited advertising is concerned, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the owners and operators of e-mail marketing company PW Marketing LLC. The lawsuit seeks a maximum of $2 million in civil penalties for violation of state law designed to protect residents from unsolicited e-mail.

e-Marketing To Over Fifties (australia.internet.com, October 2nd)
Figures suggesting that a maturing population of prosperous baby-boomers is making an impression on the demographic profiles of several major markets imply that so-called 'grey marketing' is of paramount importance to the future of many companies.

Study: Newspaper Sites Missing Out on Ad Dollars (internet.com, October 2nd)
Research conducted by Borrell Associates finds that newspapers expect to boost online ad revenue by courting Internet advertisers and readers through different methods than exclusively those used by their offline counterparts.

Yahoo! to Offer Rich Media Microsites (internet.com, October 1st)
Web portal Yahoo! is aiming to boost its advertising effectiveness after users click an ad, by beefing up its capabilities with rich media microsites.