In concert with its online and offline network siblings, the music site forges a direct link between audience and marketers. ‘The buzzword is covergence,” says Allan Infeld, senior vice president of advertising sales for MTVi. The main sites at Viacom’s MTVi—MTV.com, VH1.com, and Country.com—converge with their TV partners, MTV, VH1, and CMT (Country Music Television). The sites link online content to TV programs, especially TV awards shows, allowing visitors to vote online for the best songs, the best bands, and more. In November, My VH1 Awards Show was created completely online, with visitors to VH1.com voting not just …

The financial news is always riveting, and the same can be said for the site’s special-format ad campaigns—now sold in dayparts. Everyone from business executives to investors visits CBSMarketwatch because it provides up-to-the-minute financial news. “It’s proprietary real-time financial and business news we build ourselves,” says Scot McLernon, executive vice president of sales. “They come in throughout the day to see what’s happening in the market, on the street, and in their own portfolios.” And when they come in, they see a variety of advertising in the latest formats. “It’s an evolving medium, and advertising solutions are consistently changing,” …

There’s much more to the site than topnotch news content, and the new ‘surround sessions’ model is just the latest of many ad innovations. NYTimes.com contains everything that appears in the national and New York editions of the paper. But as you would expect, there’s a lot more to the website than topnotch news content. It also includes a variety of additional interactive features, including a Flash animation photo journal of the war in Afghanistan, audio and video cooking programs, interviews with reporters and editors, and tours of restaurants reviewed in the paper. The site is also renowned for …

By tying them into user searches, the popular search engine gives ads a relevancy—and click-through rates—banners can’t match. There are many different search engines, but Google is becoming the most popular because of its speed and ease of use. "It's the fastest way to find information on the web. Our traffic is based on that," according to Tim Armstrong, vice president of national sales. Its advertising is tied into user searches, with two kinds of ads served to each search: large-size Premium ads and smaller Adwords. There are two Premium positions on the top of each page and eight …

From consistently high ratings in ad-sales service to constant innovations in creative units, the mother of all portals has plenty to shout about. The starting point for many web users, Yahoo isn’t just the top portal, it’s also the top site on the web—its endless content offerings providing something for everyone. Yahoo was among the first online navigational guides to the web and today is stocked with a wealth of content that enables users to do everything from shop to research stocks. There are a range of services for businesses and Yahoo Broadcast is the leading streamer of audio and …

In order to name the best online publishers in ten different categories, we had to decide what an online publisher was. First, know that we limited our selections to the more than 8,000 ad-supported websites, since they are the ones of interest to MEDIA Magazine’s readership of online planners and buyers. Naturally, you’d expect to find the big-name offline (read: old-line) publishers with web franchises—the newspaper, magazine, and entertainment conglomerates. Then there are the newly established Internet brands, principally the portals and search engines (it’s getting hard to tell them apart, as they acquire or morph into one another). We’ve …

Broadband technology has been around for some time but has been slow to take off. In August 2000, about 147 million people had Internet access in the U.S. Of that only about 5 million were broadband subscribers. In 2001 those numbers rose to 166 million online, of which 11 million had broadband access. What makes broadband so special, and why have only 6 percent of U.S. Internet users taken advantage of it? Two things to know about broadband Internet: First, the transfer of data on a broadband connection is digital rather than analog. Your old 56k modem took your …

When Engage left the media business back in August 2001, many people thought it had also exited the ad-serving business. Apparently, that wasn’t the case. After parent company CMGI didn’t renew a $50 million loan with Engage, a buyer was sought for Engage Media. BlueStreak purchased AdKnowledge, Engage’s campaign analytic product, and Engage shut down its ad network in September 2001. Engage is now a software/content management company, and two of its products are ad servers. AdManager boasts 200 clients, such as Microsoft and Looksmart, who maintain the software themselves. Pricing begins at $21,000 for license fees, with additional …

MarketItRight.com is a free service that provides more than 1,500 clear, step-by-step guides for launching comprehensive marketing campaigns. Once you have signed up and logged on, MarketItRight.com has a plethora of resources from which to learn. For example, clicking on “Media Planning and Placement” brings you to the choices of magazine, radio, newspaper, outdoor, television, and placement without planning. Once you have selected one of those six possibilities, you can choose the plan you’d like to generate. After putting in your personal information, you become available for interested parties to contact you about your plan. There are two …

When people talk about product-placement advertising, they usually mean placing products in TV shows and movies, the obvious venues. Now there’s an online twist, developed by iHappen Interactive: The company will place products in original online events that participants design themselves. Visitors to Snowball.com, for example, are offered the opportunity to create their own movies, which could then have product ads placed in them. The clothes the actors wear, the cars they drive, and even their hair accessories could be advertised brand-name products. “It integrates personal experience with advertising,” says iHappen executive vice president Samantha Gumenick. “We’re trying to …