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 …

Everyone seems to be talking about "creepy crawly ad formats" the Wall Street Journal reported on earlier today. The discussion started with an ad Weather.com ran for Discovery's Animal Planet, featuring an animated lizard that emerges from a weather map and runs across the page. Why? It's supposed to promote the channel's "Pet Psychic" program. First off, why Weather.com allowed this thing to run around its homepage is truly beyond me, but I strongly dislike lizards, snakes and other crawly things in person or on the screen, so you could say I'm biased. In all seriousness, though, I do …

Who says marketing to consumers via their mobile phones - "m-marketing" - is destined for greatness? Not surprisingly, Nokia does. A new study undertaken by the HPI Research Group on behalf of Nokia demonstrated that the core mobile phone market (16-45 year olds) is not only receptive to m-marketing, but in certain situations would actively welcome it. It should be mentioned that HPI interviewed over 3300 people across eleven key global markets - Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and USA. When asked about receiving an e-coupon for a nearby shop, nearly a …

While it's still unclear whether Internet radio advertising is effective in any way, the amount of consumers listening to the radio over the Internet is increasing dramatically, at least according to MeasureCast.

DoubleClick Inc. today unveiled the results of a shopping study, which reveals that consumers are leveraging multiple channels to make purchasing decisions across many categories.

If you’re interested in geo-targeting your online ads, this latest batch of data should be of some interest to you. The latest release from Nielsen//NetRatings reveals that Pittsburgh took the No. 1 spot as the fastest growing wired city in the U.S., jumping 20.4% year-over-year this past December to 1.2 million Web surfers.

Say what you will about DoubleClick and their media division, but they seem to have come up with a very good idea – to automize the process of evaluating the performance of multi-channel campaigns.