London is calling New Yorkers with a simple message: If you like to shop, London is an ideal travel destination. Targeting affluent shoppers and tourists in New York, street teams this fall distributed pink shopping bags promoting VisitLondon.com. The street brigades handed out 50,000 bags in such prime shopping districts as SoHo, Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, Herald Square, Penn Station, and Times Square over the course of a month. Apart from the URL, the bags included such phrases as, "If you like hopping in SoHo, you'll love shopping in Covent Garden." The site offers information about London's …

It's pretty hard to fast-forward through the ad on the vehicle ahead of you, so Los Angeles-based Advermotion is capitalizing on California's car culture by selling ad space on automobile windows.

Attention, this is your captain speaking: JetBlue Airways and American Express have joined forces to market an AmEx JetBlue credit card through "Share the Love," a reality show in which two families compete to see which one can rack up the most rewards points on their cards by making purchases for other people. This fall AmEx selected two families who were flown to New York or Los Angeles, given a JetBlue Card from AmEx, and allowed 48 hours to earn enough American Express Award Dollars to fly home. The winning family received a year's worth of travel on JetBlue. …

Your cell phone just got a lot better at entertaining you in doctors' office waiting rooms. Now you can watch a new MTV series for a quick chuckle. Motorola and MTV Networks International's "Head and Body" is a weird and funny eight-episode -- sorry, eight-mobisode program about a headless body and his hapless head. The twentysomething odd couple work out, try to meet women, and attempt a skin-scraping shaving scene that will make you cringe with recognition. The show provides a new way to connect with young people who use cell phones as an everyday source of entertainment, says Gideon …

You probably haven't heard of Bram Cohen. He isn't starring in a movie, he doesn't rush for 100 yards a game, and he's not a figure in the White House/CIA imbroglio. But he has created BitTorrent, a software application that represents the increasingly uncertain media landscape of the future. BitTorrent is affecting the way media is created and used. It's also becoming an emblem for media that is squarely in the hands of consumers.

I have friends who've been talking about BitTorrent for months. Some are so far ahead of the curve that it seems they have already rounded the block and are sneaking up behind me. I've never been much for leaning my throat too forcefully against the cutting edge of media and technology, but I have been willing to scrape my fingers on it from time to time.

As the "gray market" for media comes into focus, Hollywood and Madison Avenue look for ways to do business with increasingly savvy consumers.

As this column went to bed, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced plans for a new Emmy award recognizing original programming presented on non-traditional viewing platforms, including "computers, mobile phones, PDAs, and similar devices." Earlier in the day, at the Traffic Audit Bureau's Out-of-Home Advertising Forum, Starcom's Jack Sullivan and John Marson of Kraft Foods described how electronic billboards equipped with Bluetooth technology were transforming billboards into the next digital, interactive medium, one capable of running TV-like commercials. Also that day, Hasbro announced deals with Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon to download cartoons to a …

Over the past year, I've observed a powerful new trend in the way brands have activated more viral, experiential, and participatory ideas and campaigns. This trend has manifested itself in the emergence of highly sophisticated multi-platform viral marketing ideas which in many cases allow the consumer to shape the story.

Too many marketers are failing to improve their marketing effectiveness because they incorrectly view measurement as their most significant challenge, and so charge their research organizations to fix the problem. In doing so, they underestimate the challenges of building new skills, changing established processes, managing data, and acquiring tools. Successful marketing effectiveness initiatives are transformational. They are almost always cross-functional in nature, and require a consistent focus over a period of years to ensure organizational buy-in and adoption. Unfortunately, few organizations can free up the skills and dedicated resources to drive these changes over time. As a result, companies …