advertising

Handvertising: Marketing (re)discovers the human body

Advertising space is scarce. No wonder advertisers are innovative when it comes to taking advantage of underutilized real estate--such as the human skin.

Handvertising USA is an Orange County-based company that connects advertisers with customers willing to display ads on their hands.

"Almost everyone has been to a county fair, swap meet, bar or club and had had their hand stamped for proof of entry. We have found a better use for this space that could make everyone happy," says CEO Mike Brown. "We find venues also use the stamps to increase business. For example, venues are … Read more

Facebook confirms big upcoming advertising announcement

Representatives from Facebook confirmed to CNET News.com on Wednesday morning that the company will be making a significant advertising-related announcement in two weeks. This coincides with the AdTech new-media marketing conference.

"Facebook has invited some of its closest advertisers to an event on November 6 in New York," a statement from the company read. "As part of it, Facebook executives will discuss new approaches for advertising online. We are not sharing any further details."

Invitees to the event were asked to be discreet about details, but at least one person leaked the information to AllFacebook.… Read more

AdBidCentral sells online ad 'futures'

You've heard of investors buying futures in oil, wheat and soybeans based on the future availability of a commodity. Well, a start-up has launched what it claims is the first futures-like marketplace for online advertising.

AdBidCentral allows companies to buy and sell premium ad space on Web sites, as opposed to current online ad exchanges, which tend to focus on last-minute remnant inventory, says Vivek Veeraraghavan, founder and chief executive of AdBidCentral.

"Today, we've got inventory listed out to February and March of next year, with full guarantees on number of impressions that will be delivered," … Read more

Upcoming: How to advertise on social networks

A few weeks ago, I moderated a panel at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, about business models on Facebook. The panelists couldn't agree on which models will actually work long-term. So I'm modifying the question and asking it another conference, the SNAP (Social Network Application Platform) confab, this Friday.

I'll be talking with Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures, Darryl Eaton of SocialMedia, Murtaza Hussain of PeanutLabs, and Todd Sawicki of Lookery. My panel starts at 1:30 pm Pacific time.We'll dive into business model topic again, focusing on advertising on social networks. If you're … Read more

Report: Entire 'Daily Show' going online

About 13,000 video clips comprising the entirety of Comedy Central's fake-news program, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart will be hitting the its official Web site later in the day, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday morning.

They won't be full episodes, but rather short clips of segments from the program; the more individual files there are, after all, means that there are more opportunities for Comedy Central to insert advertisements. "Designers have been experimenting with ads that appear for two or three seconds at the start of a clip, recede, then emerge briefly from a … Read more

OpenAds and the role of community in commercial open source

OpenAds is one of my favorite open-source companies. It's disrupting a market that is, itself, disrupting other markets. A match made in heaven.

But Scott Switzer, founder of the company and erstwhile CEO, is not taking its future for granted, and has left many key decisions to the OpenAds community, as noted in Linux.com. This is what separates a successful open-source project from a project with an open-source license and proprietary mindset.

Switzer says listening to the community is the most important aspect of commercializing an open source project.… Read more

Mochi Media puts ads, analytics in Flash games

Mochi Media today is publicly launching a toolkit that serves ads in Flash games and also collects analytics. Since Flash games can spread across the Web rapidly and without the blessing of their designers, having some way to make the games phone home to developers, and send money back while they're at it, is a great idea and killer business model.

The big part of today's public release of the product is the ad network, MochiAds. Mochi Media sells image ads--splashy brand-building ads, not buy-me-now clickthrough drivers--to its own ad base at a $5.00 CPM (cost per … Read more

Sony's latest Bravia ad walks like an Egyptian

First bouncy balls, then geysers, then bunnies, and now Egypt's pyramids--Sony's rainbow-colored Bravia television ads are just about as Craveable as they get. Now here's a new one, created for the company's Egyptian market, featuring colorful spools of thread unwinding their way down Pharaoh-commissioned ruins.

It's inherently not quite as cool as the San Francisco bouncy balls because the shots of zillions of spools of thread cascading down a side of the Great Pyramid were clearly computer-generated, but it's still pretty. And that's what counts, right?

$10 says Sony does a Bravia … Read more

Message to advertisers: Search engines, not phones

New research is finding that people don't mind ads when they are searching for something online but don't relish the idea of getting ads, even local business ads, on their cell phones.

A new survey from Nielsen/NetRatings and WebVisible of consumer behavior and attitudes around online advertising finds that nearly three-quarters of U.S. Internet users believe they are overexposed to advertising. And nearly as many say they prefer finding products and services through search engines than having ads sent directly to them.

Of the nearly 2,000 people surveyed last month, most said they only get … Read more