Marketing

You just launched a new interactive ad campaign and corresponding landing page. You discussed the page design with your team. You know your customers. You've built out the landing page to meet their expectations and be consistent with the campaign. All done, right? Businesses undercut the potential...

If you told Rhett Frandsen 10 years ago he'd end up being a professional widget-maker, he probably would have called you crazy. "Back then, widgets were only something you read about in your economics book," Frandsen laughed. "Until Apple coined the phrase, everybody had sort of agreed upon the fact...

Microsoft is forging ahead with plan B, now that its proposed merger with Yahoo is all but dead. It is expanding its relationship with Facebook to broaden exposure of its Windows Live Search as well as increase its own search ad business. This latter goal, of course, had been the point behind the fa...

The world of online business communication has introduced two industry-changing elements for small business: more customers and more competitors. Circa 1999, you were ahead of the competition by simply having a Web site to preview your service or products. By 2004, Web transactions were the norm, an...

Digital billboards and digital signage networks in retail are driving the rapid expansion of outdoor/out-of-home advertising, rivaling the Internet as the fastest-growing advertising medium. What's fueling this growth? The ability to reach the elusive consumers while they are out of home, and especi...

The company that pioneered the concept of skipping past television commercials is now introducing a new kind of TV-based advertising. TiVo has joined forces with Amazon to create an interactive system that will let viewers buy products featured on TV shows -- right from their remotes. TiVo Product P...

Among other things, the top percentile of the global brand name identities also affect what's pulling the strings of the world's stock exchanges, and when they sneeze, a shiver triggers throughout the globe, altering the wealth of national economies. The fact that markets shoot up or down when custo...

Now you can buy any domain with any suffix. If a dot-com is gone, so what? For a cost, you can create your own suffix using any letters and any name. Domain names are made of three parts. The www, the "name" and the suffix like .com. With ICANN's latest decision, you now have full creative control o...

What seems to have started as a simple play to create new cartoon content for the Web -- and make money from it -- may in effect usher in a new media distribution model. A Web search engine giant, a highly paid cartoon creator, and a production company are all working together to deliver 50 two-minu...

Yahoo has inked a deal with Publicis Groupe's newly announced VivaKi Nerve Center that will provide clients of the France-based communications company with more targeted and personalized advertising options to maximize global opportunities for mobile ads, the companies announced Wednesday. The new i...

For most companies, a corporate ad that spreads virally on YouTube is nothing short of a dream come true. Not so for JCPenney, which is protesting a racy and unauthorized ad that took the video-sharing site by storm -- until YouTube removed it. The purported ad, titled "Speed Dressing," shows two te...

Behind every effort and every move of any company of any size lies a very simple and powerful fact. That is, the outside world responds to the name identity of a company before they decide to spend their money. Customers are influenced by the personality of the name identity, what it says, connotes,...

A few years ago, it became clear that Google was gunning for a big chunk of Microsoft's empire. Now, the undisputed king of search is targeting another online category with the release of Ad Planner, a package of free Web analytics, research and media-planning tools. Ad Planner essentially helps adv...

Though the ink has hardly dried on the ad partnership deal between Google and Yahoo, Congress is already setting its investigative machinery in motion to determine whether the tie-up might violate antitrust or privacy laws. The U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection had a...

At one point in the U.S.'s development, there were 1,400 or so railroads. Today, there are three major lines. Admittedly it is a leap -- but not a big one -- for Jeff Bates, cofounder of Slashdot, to apply that history to what is happening on the Internet today. "If the Internet has taught us anythi...