Underscoring the explosive growth of the out-of-home television market, CBS Corp. is acquiring SignStorey Inc., a leading developer of ad-supported video programming in the retail sector.

It's easier to find Australian rules football on cable television than Al Jazeera English. Since launching in the United States last year, the English language version of the Arabic 24-hour news network has gotten little uptake on cable due to Al Jazeera's reputation here for having an anti-American bias.

Who needs second life when you can immerse yourself in a virtual world populated by Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the Flintstones? Warner Bros. Entertainment announced plans to launch T-Works, an immersive social experience online featuring all of the studio's key animated characters.

In the advertising world, it's not good to be a sheep. For ad campaigns and consumers, the key is to stand out from the pack, celebrate individualism and avoid conformity at all costs. But the recent trend of agencies and marketers embracing the sheep metaphor seems less than original.

MySpace is getting into the reverse engineering business. The 110 million user social network has become a force to contend with in the music business, turning into one of the most important sources for discovering and promoting new talent.

A Web presence is, for the first time, a critical component of a presidential campaign. Some of the candidates are enthusiastic about reaching voters through the Internet. Others, not so much. With 12 months to go, here's how we call it.

It's mourning again in America. What are we grieving? The loss of simpler times when options were few, competitive claims were straight to the point, and we could be swayed by simplistic campaign slogans, catch phrases, positions and a unique sales proposition. At least that's the nostalgic view of a media marketplace that appears to have run amuck, giving us so much choice that it often feels like too much.

The idea that you can merchandise, candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process." Those words were uttered in 1956 by the unsuccessful Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. He was beaten in a landslide by Eisenhower, who was happy to have housewives and union members pitch for him in packaged-goods style TV commercials.

In Google's hands, will YouTube become a neutered, sanitized and, thus, ad-friendly shell of its heretofore rollicking self? Will Hulu.com be leveraged with more imagination than as just an online repository for "Heroes" and "American Idol"? Will brands and programmers really love the Internet?

In recent years, commercial ratings have come to the forefront of the industry's focus - so much so that the currency for much of the national television marketplace has changed. But the reality is that while our data has changed, our understanding of commercial delivery has not.