Online Advertising - News and Blog

The economic landscape may not be great but that's not stopping big internet players from making acquisition moves. This week's news was dominated by M&A and M&A-related items.

Professor David Crystal is a linguistics expert and has developed 'semantic ad targeting' technology that he claims can be used to more accurately place ads in the correct context.

Professor Crystal recently sold his company Crystal Semantics to online ad network ad pepper media, which has used the technology to launch its iSense targeting system.

We talked to Prof. Crystal and ad pepper's board director Sacha Carton about the technology...

Selling on the web is quickly becoming lessabout marketers’ supply meeting up with customers’ demand, and more about customers themselves actively bringing their demand toward supply. 

In fact, they're creating supply in many cases. And successful marketers are creating experiences for customers -- not merely selling to them.

Facebook has added another huge pile of cash to its bank account, this time in the form of a $100m debt financing from TriplePoint Capital.

The company, which has already raised more than $350m in equity financing from investors such as Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, says that the money will be used "entirely for servers."

Doritos, the tortilla corn crisp brand owned by PepsiCo, has launched a new online campaign to engage users with an interactive website, user generated content and strong links to social networking sites.

Historically, FMCG brands have been slow to embrace online marketing as they have struggled to deliver a compelling creative message and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Microsoft might be the software company that everyone loves to hate, and Steve Ballmer might be crazy .

But Microsoft and Ballmer proved two things by deciding to walk away from an acquisition of Yahoo this past weekend - they are not desperate and they are not stupid.

This week's hodgepodge of articles I found interesting includes news that could impact the Microsoft-Yahoo courtship, online streaming music, digital thieves and young entrepreneurs.

Yesterday, one of my readers pointed me in the direction of a TechCrunch guest post by Mike Jones.

Jones was CEO of Userplane, "a communications widget provider" which was acquired by AOL in 2006. He is now a Senior VP at AOL.

Most of the news that caught Drama 2.0's attention this week was primarily filled with drama in one form or another.

Pheedo is a US-based RSS ad network that serves ads through feeds, among other things.

We caught up with CEO and co-founder Bill Flitter to find out more about RSS  advertising and how it might finally put the debate over partial versus full feeds to bed.