It takes a lot to impress this self-admitted cynic when it comes to anything Internet-related, but my recent experience with InStyle magazine did it.

Yesterday the IAB unveiled yet another set of research results that show that larger online ads perform better in communicating brand attributes. The study compared a 30-second McDonald's TV spot to a set of online formats, including a 30-second Superstitial, banners, skyscrapers, boxes and rectangles, and found that the largest lift in consumer awareness was created by the Superstitial.

Today's merger of pay-for-performance players ValueClick and Search123 may seem less than newsworthy at first, but it may be the beginning of a trend in search marketing.

The one trump in the hand of interactive media has always been the ability to tell advertisers, "unlike TV, we can give you exact counts of everything your ad goes through online - from how many people see it, to how many act on it." This argument has never really been enough to convince anyone to shift significant TV dollars to the Internet, but now the time has come to rethink it completely.

Every so often I write something that touches a nerve with our readers and get dozens of emails back telling me I'm either right or wrong. Many of these emails make it into our Letters to the Editor newsletter every Friday, but all of them I ponder for days, sometimes reevaluating my original opinion on the issue at hand. This week I wrote that AOL would not survive if spun off from the AOL Time Warner empire, and got almost an equal number of Yeas and Nays from readers. While I'm still holding to my opinion, I thought it might …

Here's a quick look at the world through the online lens, just in case you're thinking of going global with your next online campaign.

The possibility of AOL spinning off from AOL Time Warner seems to be taking up a lot of time at the water cooler, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that we pick a term other than "spin off."

Jim Carrey's new move may have pushed the Matrix Reloaded to #2 at the box office this past weekend, but Keanu Reeves is still ruling the web.

For a while now, most marketers have thought of video games and the Internet as separate entities, but the time may be right to reconsider that position, according to a recent research study from Lucid Marketing.

Things are looking up! The Online Publishers Association announced yesterday that a poll of 24 OPA members showed that first-quarter ad revenue grew an average of 40.7% over Q1 2002. What's more, total revenue among this group was up an average of 37.6% over the same period last year.