Wanna know what we did this summer? Cannes, of course ? the International Festival of Advertising. From the cozy Havas Café on the Croisette to the woozy Gutter Bar to the stunning Eden Rock, this was a business trip, believe it or not, with some notable sightseeing on the side. For instance: Irwin Gotlieb, CEO of GroupM, stopping to meet Fernando Rodes Vila, CEO of Havas ? their first encounter. Or Michel Roth, CEO of Interpublic, lunching on the seaside terrace at the Hotel de Cap in Antibes by day and hitting the pavement with the Gutter Bar crowd by …

As unimaginable as this seems, by the time you read this, the majority of summer will be over. I assume you share my dread of the end of summer; nearly everyone I know anxiously counts down the months of spring (or weeks, here in Minnesota), only to find themselves lamenting the onset of September in what seems like a blink of an eye.

Honey, can you tell me what a commercial is?” I asked my 4-year-old daughter recently between the end of a “Barney” episode and the beginning of “Dora the Explorer.” “Oh, Mommy,” she sighed. “A commercial is a picture of something cool that they put on before the show starts.” If it’s on TV, it’s cool, at least to kids under the age of six. Advertising’s pull on consumers of all ages is strong, but it is perhaps strongest with kids. Not a day goes by that I’m not summoned to the TV set to see …

Think of Uth TV as YouTube for 13- to 24-year-olds, minus the copyright issues. The year-old company offers young people an outlet to upload original content they create, from audio and video files to images and text. People of all ages can register to become members, but only teens and young adults can post content.

One antidote for viewer apathy toward televised public service announcements? Humor. Working with the American Liver Foundation (ALF) to raise awareness about liver disease, filter Advertising took a turn away from the “scared straight” PSA formula. “People are becoming desensitized to all of the statistics and facts out there,” says filter cofounder and creative director Jay Sharfstein. “We wanted to take an approach that would get people to stop and take notice.” In one 30-second ad, a man’s girlfriend spots a strange figure lurking in the corner. He tells her not to worry, …

Popsicles, those symbols of bygone childhood summers, got a campy superhero makeover this season. Minneapolis-based Campbell Mithun created a new series of TV spots for client Popsicle, a division of Good Humor-Breyers Ice Cream North America, owned by Unilever. With hokey animation evoking 1950s cartoons, “Giant Robots” and “Unfun Monkeys” hearken back to simpler times. The ads are tied to a contest offering five Xbox 360s and a year’s supply of Popsicle products as grand prizes. Campbell Mithun won an even bigger prize: the Breyers, Klondike, and Good Humor accounts, to the tune of $25 million.

While men are typically forced to wait outside dressing rooms as women try on countless pieces of clothing, women face a similar experience when accompanying men into tech stores. Stores like Best Buy have taken steps to address the disparity.

By most accounts, TiVo is supposed to be the nemesis of advertising, a weapon with which consumers can zap ads away. That may be changing with TiVo Product Watch, launched this spring, which allows advertisers to deliver ads to premium broadband subscribers who are actively searching for products in given areas. Product Watch allows TiVo viewers to search for content from more than 70 advertisers and 100 brands, from one-minute spots to hour-long instructional videos. “We’ve offered ads to customers on a purely opt-in basis before,” says Davina Kent, TiVo’s national vice president of ad sales. “We’ve …

Readers of The Economist rely on it to deliver an analysis of world markets twice a month. Subscribers to People trust the glossy to sum up celeb life once a week. Now a growing number of people would be hard-pressed to navigate the plethora of video on the Web without Mooky.tv.

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