E-Commerce

Five leading American publishers, including Time and Conde Nast, officially unveiled what is, effectively, an online digital newsstand on Tuesday. The announcement ended months of speculation about the project. The five will offer a service from which readers can buy subscriptions to their publicati...

A trend is not a fad. A fad comes and goes quickly, while trends have staying power. Great ideas become trends when they are widely adopted beyond their original driving force. Such is the case with the marketing trend of direct digital marketing -- relevant digital marketing communications that are...

Yahoo has joined the growing number of companies updating their privacy policies with new tools to better manage the data that is collected about consumers. The company has launched a beta tool called "Ad Interest Manager" that shows users what interests Yahoo thinks they have based on their online ...

Selling wireless and media products online is a complex challenge that often falls short of the expectations of seasoned online shoppers and results in a frustrating user experience. Wireless and cable operators, wireless resellers and handset manufacturers try to mirror online shopping with their o...

Verizon Wireless and AT&T may have settled their differences over Verizon's advertising messages in the courtroom, but there is little sign Verizon is pulling its punches elsewhere. With its latest ad, though, Verizon may have toed over a line by invoking gender stereotypes. The ad depicts the i...

Comcast just bought itself a nice little present for the holidays: NBC Universal. The cable network will have a controlling stake in NBC once the deal is flattened out, and in return, it's giving General Electric $6.5 billion along with $7.25 billion worth of programming. If everything passes muster...

Consumer online spending habits continue to evolve, and as average shoppers look for new ways to stretch their budgets during tough economic times, online coupon usage has grown. In fact, online searches for coupons and offers have increased by 58 percent over the past year. Savvy shoppers are beco...

It's official: Comcast has engineered what appears to be the biggest media joint venture of the year -- a multibillion-dollar merger that will combine General Electric's NBC Universal with Comcast's own cable networks. Once complete, Comcast will take majority ownership of NBC, ending GE's 20 year c...

Did someone just blink in the great Google vs. News Corp. paid content smackdown? The latest round of digital brinksmanship involving how the search giant aggregates news stories behind paywalls got more interesting Tuesday when Google announced a couple of measures to placate publishers, including ...

Online sales were up almost 14 percent year over year for 2009's Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving and traditionally a big selling day for online retailers. Shoppers spent over 38 percent more per order compared to 2008's figures, and they bought nearly 10 percent more items per orde...

IBM's recent Connect 2009 analyst conference provided fascinating insights into one of the company's most valuable assets -- its software group organization. IBM has long been recognized as a purveyor of enterprise-class computing systems, but during the past decade, the company's global services or...

Online shoppers took to their computers in droves on Black Friday, spending 11 percent more than they did a year ago and buoying e-tailers' hopes for a bountiful holiday season. That's according to a report released Sunday by market research firm comScore, which counted $595 million in online sales ...

You may think it's annoying when you see the same commercial repeated during a 2:30 ad break in prime time, but have no fear -- there is a method to an advertiser's madness. They simply want to make sure you are exposed to that product's branding/logo even as you're fast-forwarding past it on a digi...

As we begin to wrap up development efforts for the holiday lockdown, we often get into conversations with our partners about strategies and priorities for 2010. (Yes, we'll be there before you know it!) For many retailers, 2009 has been the year of social media. Investment so far has been primarily ...

Google is amping up its display ad capabilities with the acquisition of startup Teracent, which has developed machine-learning algorithms that can create and customize an ad in real-time, based on user preferences and other characteristics. There are thousand of such "creative elements" that can be ...