Omnicom Group's Tribal DDB is beefing up its mobile marketing capabilities by aligning with specialist MobileBehavior, also part of Omnicom. Six-person MobileBehavior, which provides strategy and user experience consulting for brands, will continue to serve its own clients. Now, it will move into Tribal's New York office to serve as its North America center of excellence for mobile. Tribal already has mobile specialty offerings in Hamburg, Germany, and Tokyo. Clients have increasingly asked for mobile strategies, said Rich Guest, Tribal U.S. co-president, with a particular surge of interest in the past six months. Tribal has devised and executed mobile programs …

People who watch TV shows online will tolerate about twice the amount of ads the medium now averages, per comScore research. "Across ages 18-49, seven minutes per hour represents the upper limit of advertising load for which viewers will remain engaged, with just over 6.5 minutes being the middle ground for achieving maximum engagement," says comScore's Tania Yuki. "Importantly, this 6.5 minute threshold represents an ad load that is more than 50 percent greater than what is currently being served to online audiences." The survey took into account age, income, platform preference, reasons for viewing online, satisfaction with …

Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert announced plans for competing rallies to be held Oct. 30 in Washington, D.C., on the National Mall. Stewart described his "Return to Sanity" rally as an attempt to tone down the level of dialogue in debate over issues. Stewart called the "million moderate rally" an attempt "to take it down a notch, indicating the two-to-three-hour rally will be "spreading the timeless message of 'Take it down America.'" Colbert, meanwhile, announced his "March to Keep Fear Alive" to be held the same day "to fight Jon Stewart's creeping reasonableness," and offering his own Web …

Government funds for the ailing media industry would jeopardize the freedom of the press and undermine the public's trust in its reporting, according to Federal Communications Commission member Meredith Attwell Baker, daughter-in-law to former Sec. of State James Baker. Speaking at the Capitol Hill Media Summit on Wednesday, Baker warned that a government bailout of media companies would only reduce the public's faith in their reporting. "Without true independence from government, the press could not serve its proud role as a check on governmental authority." She cited statistics that only 20 percent of Americans think news organizations are …

Apple Inc. is developing a digital newsstand for publishers that would let them sell magazines and newspapers to consumers for use on Apple devices. The newsstand, designed particularly for the iPad, would be similar to Apple's iBook store for electronic books, but separate from Apple's App Store, where people can buy some publications now. Apple's effort is aimed at luring more consumers to the iPad and helping publishers sell subscriptions, rather than single issues. The main hang-ups between Apple and publishers including Time Warner Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst Corp. and News Corp. are who controls data about users and …

Fox Broadcasting has sold more than 90% of its Super Bowl advertising time, with prices running at an average of about $3 million for a 30-second spot, say sources. Strong, early sales for the 2011 National Football League championship game suggest that advertisers are as willing as ever to pay up more than 100 million viewers, despite worries about the economy and budget constraints. Super Bowl XLV will be played on February 6 in Texas. A year ago at this time, CBS Corp's CBS broadcast network had sold roughly 70 percent of the time it had available for the …

New York City would have the right to terminate its franchise agreements with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision Systems if broadband-delivered video starts to significantly erode cable TV revenue over the next 10 years, under a new pact. The provision -- believed to be the first of its kind -- "helps protect City franchise revenue by enabling the City to renegotiate if there is substantial shift in content delivery from cable to 'new' and/or emerging technologies," said New York's Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications. City officials will have the option to terminate the agreements if franchise fees …

Brand.net is releasing a new buying platform that would allow advertisers to purchase page views at specific prices ahead of time, a specialized form of hedging. The tool forecasts what prices for online ads will be at a future date within a particular category, such as entertainment or automobiles. Brand.net will set a price on CPMs, which the ad agency can buy ahead of time. In actuality, Brand.net will not own any inventory of pages but will instead log the price and bill clients. The company will only insert the buy order at the intended buy dates across …

Making its move to cable, "The Martha Stewart Show" attracted a cumulative average audience of 394,000 in its debut on the Hallmark Channel on Monday -- down more than 50% from the classic TV repeats that Hallmark aired in the same period last year. Starting this week, "Martha Stewart" is anchoring a daily 10 a.m.-6 p.m. lifestyle programming block on Hallmark provided by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. The 10 a.m. broadcast of a new episode of the show reached an average of only 199,000 viewers, according to Nielsen data, down 61% from the 514,000 attracted by a year-ago airing …

Representatives of independent cable nets are asking the FCC to launch a proceeding revamping the retransmission consent process. American Television Alliance members, including Outdoor Channel, Starz, Africa Channel, Retirement Living TV and the Gospel Movie Channel, are also calling on Congress to urge the FCC to step in and lower the payments to non-broadcast affiliated networks. The independent channels say that making independent networks fund their broadcast network competitors by bearing the retrans costs would be a "direct assault" on independent programmers and a threat to the public interest benefit of a diversity of voices. They argue that broadcasters …