You know what it’s like to get a couple of friends to agree on where to go for lunch. If you think that’s tough, imagine getting 150 leaders of the media industry to agree on where online advertising is headed in 2003. Well, that’s exactly what we tried to do at our annual Forecast conference in New York this past September. We invited 150 of the top media planners, buyers, sellers, marketers and researchers to debate a series of resolves – on consumer branding, agency consolidation, email marketing, CRM and the overall media climate – that would help determine the …

CRMFalse Positivesby Amy Corr, amyc@mediapost.com Back in the March issue of MEDIA, we took a look at TRUSTe and ePrivacy, both of which launched tools for email users to differentiate legitimate email from spam. Today, there are two more companies on the list of spam fighters, with very different approaches: one offers a simple bonded seal of approval, while another embeds poetry into its email headers to ensure validity. Launched in mid-August, anti-spam company Habeas has a sender-warranted email program, which embeds 9 lines of custom header into outgoing email messages. The interesting thing about the embedded …

While ‘paid placement’ or paying for listings in search results has become a viable marketing tactic [p. 28], the process of getting a site listed in a search directory has become easier. Remember, people search two ways. They'll either use keywords, or comb through categories in a directory. The keyword results are generated from a combination of paid placement words with words programmatically culled from most of the sites on the Web. Category listings, on the other hand, are built by a group of human editors. There are now three primary teams of editors out there trying to …

These days it looks as though the "killer app of the online ad industry" crown belongs to search. Be it paid search or search engine optimization, for media buyers and planners, figuring out where to start is a thankless and tedious task. Here’s a good place. SEMList.com (a sub-site of earchEngineWatch.com) is a resource of companies from all over the world providing Search Engine Optimization services. Company details listed include addresses, phone numbers, URLs, services offered, fees, clients represented, and how long they have been around. The seven service categories to search by are Directory Submission, Paid Inclusion Service, Paid …

Since 1996, 24/7 Real Media has consistently held the silver medal in the race for domination of publisher-side ad-serving technology. Blame it on first-mover advantage, but the gold belonged — and still does-to DoubleClick’s behemoth DART. That may soon change. 24/7’s Open AdStream has recently made some waves in the competitive marketplace, converting several of DART’s new technology clients, including Vivendi Universal, which is made up of Rollingstone.com, the Flipside network, uproar.com, and iWin.com, among others. 24/7 claims superior one-on-one service, privacy policies, easy-to-use products, and cookie ownership for advanced targeting as advantages over the competition. Its luck holding steady, …

very year we set a new record for traffic in October as Halloween approaches," explains Leigh Lucarelli, executive producer of Circle 1’s Kidscom.com. "For kids it’s like New Year’s Eve and Christmas rolled into one." It’s also, she believes, a holiday that’s a perfect fit for the Web. "Halloween is about imagination and action, making up stories, costumes, and games," she adds. "But on TV kids just watch other kids play or dress up, or worse, just watch adults tell them what to do." This year Kidscom.com will attempt to capitalize on the Halloween traffic spike with a seasonal "Fun …