Researchers actually mapped the brain activity of several consumers while viewing Sunday's Super Bowl commercials. Using brain scan images, these researchers, from the Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, were able to determine which ads generated an emotional response to a given ad, and which ones fell flat. Disney's "NFL Dreamers" and Sierra Mist's "Airport Security" ads inspired the most engagement while FedEx, for example, fell flat, according to the research. The most common response to the ads was, predictably, repulsion: "Almost all the ads induced their greatest activity in the amygdala, a …

Spot Runner, a Web startup that creates low-priced TV commercials, is expected to announce an agreement with Cendant Corp. today to sell customized TV spots to Cendant's network of real estate agents and brokers. Spot Runner is not the first company to use online systems to sell conventional media. Google famously bought radio advertiser dMarc Broadcasting a few weeks ago, with a similar intention. Using the Web makes it cheaper for Spot Runner to broker and develop TV ads: its Web-based system brokers ad time on local broadcast and cable TV channels while its database of content allows users to …

It used to be that those super-expensive Super Bowl ads would disappear forever following the Big Game. Nowadays, Madison Avenue is trying to figure out what extended after-life these ads receive on the Web really means. This year's ads are now widely available on a multitude of formats—streaming Web pages, downloadable email files, video podcasts, etc.—prolonging the discourse that follows almost indefinitely. Super Bowl advertising is a media event in and of itself, making the estimated $2.5 million price tag for the 30 second spots seem like "something of a bargain," according to Stuart Elliott of The New York …

An aura of vulnerability and possibility always seems to undercut the unknown. Hence Wall Street's varying reaction to the news surrounding media stocks, writes The Hollywood Reporter's Diane Mermigas. Take Google's one-day $20 billlion loss in equity value last week due to lower-than-expected quarterly earnings based on higher-than-expected tax rate and increased capital spending. Never mind the company's 105% full-year earnings growth. The point, she says, is that Google--as a swiftly emerging Internet stock--is not yet viewed as a company that can reinvest and show a few growing pains. Meanwhile a company like Comcast posts a 69 percent drop in …

Leveraging its massive affiliate network, Amazon.com has launched a third party contextual network to rival the likes of Google and Yahoo. The Internet retailing giant is testing a program that distributes third-party contextual ad links to its affiliate network. Like Google's AdSense, Amazon and the affiliate each receive a cut (though the split is undisclosed) when users click on ads that are targeted based on the page's content. The text links appear alongside affiliates' links to Amazon product pages. Amazon said the move is intended to develop and maintain long-term relationships with its affiliates. Thus far, only those affiliates hand …

RealNetworks is acquiring Zylom Media Group, a European game distributor, in a move that expands the company's "casual" games business. "Casual" refers to easy-to-use puzzle and card-type games. Real paid $21 million to acquire Dutch-based Zylom, which last year earned $750,000 on revenues of $8 million. RealNetworks is best known for producing media player software that competes with Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Apple Computer's iTunes. The company also competes in the music subscription business, alongside the likes of Yahoo and Napster. Real recently won an antitrust against Microsoft, and is believed to have used the proceeds from the settlement …

An unemployed British radio producer has become one of the first podcasting superstars by proclaiming after viewing a reality show in which contestants were asked to eat an animal's penis: "I could eat a knob at night." The soundbyte has become so popular with Internet users it already appears on T-shirts displaying the slogan underneath the balding head of its author, Karl Pilkington. Pilkington said these "immortal" words on The Ricky Gervais Show, a popular British podcast, after first proclaiming he couldn't eat a penis in the morning due to a sensitive stomach. Gervais, the show's host, boasts 2.5 million …

Spending on e-mail marketing will grow at a compounded annual rate of 4.5 percent, according to a new report from Internet research firm JupiterResearch. This would see the e-mail marketing industry grow to $1.1 billion in 2010 from $885 million last year. Meanwhile the firm predicts that delivery rates, for now frozen at 88 percent, should surpass 90 percent in the next few years, lowering the cost of incorrectly blocked e-mail to $92 million by 2010 from a high of 107 million this year. Jupiter also forecasts that the volume of spam messages per consumer will drop 13 percent annually, …

The News Corporation's publishing division, HarperCollins, has made the entire text of a new business book available online for free, but it's displaying a banner ad and several contextual ads by Yahoo on each of its more than 200 pages. Ad revenues will be shared between the author and the publisher. Like other book publishers, HarperCollins is testing new ways to use the Internet as a selling vehicle for its books. Ad revenue will obviously fall far short of the retail value of the book, but the publisher believes that making the text of Go It Alone! The Secret to …

A new survey from The Gallup Poll organization finds that blogs, while catching on with Web users, haven't quite yet become required reading for most of the Internet population. Among Americans who use the Web (which is now 73 percent of the population), reading blogs appeared last on a list of thirteen things to do online, on average. One in five of those polled said they consult blogs "frequently" or at least "occasionally," but the 20 percent number trails other Web activities like instant messaging (28 percent), auctions (23 percent), videocasts and downloading music (22 percent each). Not surprisingly, e-mail …