After yesterday's minute, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of MediaPost readers who emailed me asking for contact information for the Ad Council. Today, I received another press release that falls into the category of relief efforts and I thought you might be interested in passing this on to your creative departments. The events of September 11 prompted the $17 billion per year promotional products industry's two leading organizations - the Advertising Specialty Institute and the Promotional Products Association International - to establish a new "Industry United Fund" initiative. The group coordinates the fundraising and …

The Advertising Council today announced the completion of a communications strategy created to guide the development of public service announcements in response to the events of September 11th. According to the strategy, the Ad Council's newly-formed Coalition Against Terrorism (formerly known as the Crisis Response Team) will begin to create messages that will "inform, involve and inspire all Americans to participate in activities that will strengthen our nation and help win the war on terrorism." The organization, founded in 1942 as the War Advertising Council after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, last year oversaw the donation of $1.55 …

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) announced today that after a comprehensive review of online publishing industry issues, it has commissioned two studies of online advertising with Millward Brown IntelliQuest. According to the announcement, the first study will explore the media consumption habits of the at-work online audience, while the other will examine the role of online advertising in the overall media mix with the goal of providing a better understanding of how online ads work in conjunction with other media. Michael Zimbalist, acting executive director of OPA, said these studies will “further establish online advertising as a media …

As you may know, MediaPost hosted a conference in New York yesterday. We invited 100 of the best minds in the industry and asked them to come up with some answers. Surprisingly enough, they did. The panelists debated, the audience pitched in and at the end of the day we were left with a prescription for the future: In the next year, the online advertising landscape will continue to be dominated by the big three - AOL, MSN and Yahoo! More importantly, our panelists thought that most of the ad campaigns running on these few big sites will be …

Looks like the holiday shopping season is going to start very early this year. According to a new report by online credit card issuer, NextCard, nearly one third of online shoppers will begin their online holiday shopping before November. The NextCard eCommerce Intentions survey found that almost two thirds of online shoppers will shop before mid November, indicating a desire to take care of holiday shopping well before Thanksgiving. Almost one third of online shoppers will be early-bird shoppers, starting before November. However, the majority (58%) will begin shopping in November, with more than half (29% of total respondents) shopping …

Who said no one is ever going to take advertising on personal digital assistants (PDAs) seriously? A few weeks ago, Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment announced plans to take "advergaming" from the desktop to the hand-held device with the launch of an interactive PDA-based advergame to promote "The One", the new Jet Li movie scheduled for release on November 2, 2001. What's significant about this announcement is that it marks the first time that a studio has created a PDA-based advergame on behalf of a major motion picture release. In "The One," parallel universes collide when a rogue …

Yesterday’s discussion of robots and spiders, those pesky things that surf the web and inflate web traffic figures, seems to have hit a nerve with some of our readers. Judging by the feedback I’ve received so far, everyone supports the IAB’s decision to put together a list of known robots and spiders, but that’s not nearly enough to solve the problem of discrepancies that occur when the numbers reported by sites’ ad management systems do not equal those reported by an advertiser’s third-party ad serving system. According to a recent white paper published by Mediaplex, a …

The IAB's efforts to improve the quality of online campaign measurement seem to be attracting some favorable attention for a change. The organization announced today that it has reached an agreement with ABCi, an industry leader in the online third party verification arena, for ABCi to create and maintain the ABCi/IAB master industry list of spiders and robots. Spiders and robots automatically search Web content for information. They are used for a number of tasks including retrieval of content information for commercial search engines, gathering content pages for offline viewing, tracking advertising activity and identification of "What's …

If anything can be reliably predicted these days it's that websites that offer information about current events will continue to experience unprecedented boosts in traffic. Interestingly enough, some of the more popular sites are maintained by goverment agencies. Nielsen//NetRatings reports that traffic to various government websites skyrocketed during the week ending October 14, as surfers turned to the Internet for information on the recent anthrax and terrorist-related cases. "The need for thorough and reliable information is critical, especially during this time when facts of recent events may be inaccurately reported," said Allen Weiner, VP and principal analyst …

The marketing world is seeing the evolution of two critical concepts, according to a white paper released today by Euro RSCG Worldwide. Compiled using both original analysis and secondary data, "The Empowered Consumer in the Age of Globalization" argues that understanding and catering to today's prosumers and integrating glocal strategies into brand development have become vital to the success of any advertising and marketing effort. No, those are not typos, they're words you should probably add to you dictionary. "The term prosumer refers to a proactive, empowered consumer and expresses the idea that the balance of power has …