It’s that time of year again. The one time a year the elite of the advertising media industry gets together at the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Media Conference and puts all of us Internet advertising fanatics into our proper place.

If your client roster includes travel providers, breakfast cereal companies, savings banks, cosmetics and clothes manufacturers or chicken farmers, this may be of interest to you.

The Olympics may not have done much advertising online, aside from two email blasts with streaming video content to its NBCi list, complete with a cool video illustrating the events it will be televising, but according to Nielsen//NetRatings daily overnight analysis, traffic to the two official Winter Olympic sites, NBCOlympics.com and Olympics.com, soared during this past weekend.

Well, the Olympics are starting tonight, but I have to admit I haven’t seen any Olympics-related ads on the web. Have you? Compared to the weeks leading up to the SuperBowl, when the web was flooded with information and ads about Superbowl.com and the official NFL websites, there’s really been very little promoting the Olympics online.

When I first wrote about NYTimes Digital’s concept of surround sessions back in October, many people wondered whether these things would actually work. Well, today NYTimes announced the results of pilot Surround Sessions campaigns of two advertisers - American Airlines and Nexium.

Say what you will about branding online, but it's time to face the facts - it works. Such is the conclusion of the latest joint effort between the Advertising Research Foundation, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the MSN network, and researcher Rex Briggs, who today announced the results of new research that validates the importance of online advertising.

As if we needed another ad format to deal with, a German ad serving company ADTECH (not to be confused with @d:Tech the tradeshow) today introduced what they call a "Scratchy Banner."

Even though it’s not directly related to online media, today seems to be the day to talk about the Super Bowl, and only the Super Bowl. It was a rare one - the game was far more entertaining than the commercials. And that seems to have annoyed a firm called Merwyn Technology of Cincinnati, which today released its Persuasion Research results for 2002 Super Bowl ads. The findings identify which spots were “a waste of shareholders' money and which actually have a good chance of paying off with increased sales.” Well, according to Merwyn, it looks like the …

As expected, traffic to SuperBowl.com skyrocketed 399% during the last 4 weeks. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, the official website of the game attracted 799,000 unique visitors as compared to 160,000 visitors during the week ending January 6. NetRatings says 31% of the visitors to SuperBowl.com accessed the page featuring the upcoming game between the St. Louis Rams and the New England Patriots, while 15% of the site's audience clicked on pages featuring play-by-play analysis of the conference championships. Surfers accessed more than 5.2 million pages, skyrocketing 533% in the past four weeks. Surfers spent twice as much time at SuperBowl.com this …