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'Mad Men' star leads Yahoo's pitch to Madison Avenue

NEW YORK--When Yahoo finally debuted its display-ad platform in a press conference here on Wednesday, CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker had an unusual guest on hand: actor Jon Hamm, who plays 1960s-era advertising exec Don Draper on the critically acclaimed drama Mad Men.

"I do feel a little strange being up in front of a group of people, in front of cameras, talking about advertising, instead of smoking nine cigarettes and drinking three or four glasses of Scotch," Hamm said, referring to Draper's hard-living attitude, "although maybe if this was a little later in … Read more

MySpace launches DIY ad-targeting site

MySpace looks to be kicking off a new do-it-yourself service for creating and placing ads on its site.

The service, called the Self-Serve Ad Service and still in beta, lets anyone capable of filling out a basic Web form promote a band or business on MySpace.com.

Users can choose to either upload their own ad or create one using MySpace's system. After selecting from a few dozen templates and uploading an image to place in the ad, users get to select their target audience: gender, age, region, city/state, and interests. For instance, you could target your ad … Read more

AOL announces BidPlace ad exchange

As part of Advertising Week in New York, AOL's Platform-A ad service has unveiled BidPlace, an ad exchange that will launch in the first half of next year.

In an ad exchange, advertisers place bids on pieces of inventory, and the highest bidder wins. It's the premise behind companies such as Right Media, which Yahoo acquired in 2007 after initially investing in it.

BidPlace will let advertisers bid on AOL sites, its partner sites, and third-party sites that use Platform-A's ad network. AOL says Platform-A's network reaches 90 percent of online audiences, according to ComScore statistics.… Read more

Featured Freeware: Craigslist Reader Pro

If you've ever hunted for a job, housing, furniture, or love on Craigslist.com, you'll appreciate the focus that Craigslist Reader Pro brings to your search. The desktop reader isn't pretty to look at, but it quickly lets you hone your search in Craigslist's key cities and categories, even displaying negative search terms and appropriate variables, such as images, price ranges, and--for housing--the allowance of pets.

For each search, Craigslist Reader Pro took a few seconds to load results into the top of four panels. The panel below displays the contents of each entry in an … Read more

Widgetbox turns on 'Blog Network'

Widgetbox is one of many companies that jumped on the widget bandwagon, and now it's jumping on the ad network bandwagon.

So far, the company has 135,000 embeddable objects and 64 million monthly consumers of its widgets, which live on blogs, social-networking sites, and other Web destinations. The most popular widgets are "The Fun Classic Super Mario Game In Flash," BabyTicker: The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker," "Cyber-pet," "Bubbles," and "Idiot Test."

While Widgetbox claims 462 million widget views in a month across 500,000 discrete domains, the big numbers … Read more

BuzzLogic's ad network exits beta

BuzzLogic, a start-up that tracks "influence" across the confusing blog landscape, has pushed its ad network out of beta to a full release.

The "Conversation Ad Network" debuted in beta mode in June and uses BuzzLogic's influence-tracking technology as a way to draw in both advertisers and bloggers. Advertisers are promised access to the most influential bloggers in their niches, and bloggers with that influence are offered more lucrative deals.

Prior to launching the ad network, BuzzLogic purchased ActiveWeave, manufacturer of browser plug-in BlogRovr, to shape it into a tool for clients. Then, during its … Read more

Google's Schmidt: Full steam ahead Yahoo ad deal

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Despite increasing scrutiny from regulators, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt showed no signs of being deterred from its plan to put into effect its search-ad deal with Yahoo less than a month from now.

"Time is money in our business," Schmidt said in a meeting with reporters at company headquarters here, and in the absence of an opinion from regulators, the company plans to go ahead with the deal. "We do not know their position," whether it's a great deal, a poor deal, or whether regulators will want changes, he said.

He … Read more

Google to display religious groups' anti-abortion ads

Google has agreed to display ads for anti-abortion messages from religious groups on its search site as part of an out-of-court settlement with a British Christian organization, the group said Wednesday.

The Christian Institute filed a legal action against Google in April, after the search giant rejected an anti-abortion ad from the group, citing its policy of not accepting ads that contain "abortion and religion-related content."

Lawyers for The Christian Institute alleged that Google's policy violated the United Kingdom's Equality Act of 2006, which prohibits religious discrimination in providing services.

In a statement, Google said: "… Read more

Google audio search graduates to Labs project

Google has elevated the profile of its attempt to make videos searchable through speech recognition technology, a move that portends a potentially more financially successful YouTube division.

The speech recognition technology was used in an online application that let people search political speeches launched in July, and now the Gaudi (Google Audio Indexing) project has an official interface at Google Labs.

The site's search box has instructions: "Search what the politicians are saying." The search results are presented next to a YouTube video player, and clicking each result sets the player to show the part of the … Read more