Here's a look at three passionate beverage brand loyalists who blog about their favorite brand.

It had all the makings of a cautionary tale. A 21-year-old entrepreneur named Alex Tew from Wiltshire, U.K., concocted a scheme to sell $1 million worth of ad space on the individual pixels of a single Web page. Gimmick-obsessed advertisers shilling poker and ringtones snatched up every last pixel, making Tew an instant millionaire and inspiring a rash of media coverage and copycat sites like "Million Dollar Advertiser" and 1000tags.com. All this hoopla caught the unwelcome eye of online extortionists, who crashed Tew's "Million Dollar Homepage" after he refused to cough up a $50,000 ransom. The site went back …

Be warned that the next time your mother reminds you to drink your Ovaltine, she may have been paid to do it. That's because Experience, Inc. has taken its online brand influencer services offline. The company now uses non-professional recruits to spread the word about particular brands and products via blogs, e-mails, product placements, casual discussions, posters, fliers, and sampling. Recruits are also expected to encourage friends and loved ones to complete brand surveys. Experience focuses on influencing free-spending and easily influenced 18- to 34-year-olds. "Our job is to develop brand ambassadors," enthuses Jennifer Floren, founder and …

Dunkin' Donuts, an online innovator? To launch its new Turbo Ice coffee drink, the donut chain hired advergaming pioneer BrandGames to produce a series of amusing animated shorts and games about Slacker Turtle, a lazy kid in a turtle suit who manages to win races against his nemesis, Da Hare, by drinking Turbo Ice. To draw surfers to the site, BrandGames created rich media banner ads that carried short-form animated movies. The shorts ran on entertainment, music, and gaming sites.Rather than the usual animated come-ons, however, the Dunkin' Donuts ads were true stand-alone films, uncluttered by text and …

Say you notice a huge, unexpected spike in time spent online with mortgage refinancing content and you want to know -- now, not a month from now -- what creative has encouraged that interest. That's where Coremetrics 2006, a new Web site and campaign analytics suite, can help. Coremetrics' proprietary Live profiles enable marketers to quickly analyze and visualize online marketing performance on a variety of metrics and across multiple Web properties. Coremetrics 2006's one-click segmentation feature drills down into site usage, traffic, and transaction data to offer insight into whatever patterns marketers need to analyze -- online revenues, …

In a novel marketing mash-up, TLC Industries, a Schaumburg, Ill.-based maker of video arcade games, is angling to merge online and offline promotion, in-store branding, and events. Its Online Onpremise program enables consumers to play an addictive game like virtual pool at a Web site, then invites them to play the same game with their same user ID on branded arcade machines at pizza parlors and sports bars. The combination of connected arcade machines and online play allows for continuous national tournaments. The coin-operated machines essentially let patrons underwrite the promotion with their quarters. Sponsors can place messaging on …

For a new organization based on an old idea, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is using some mighty trendy tactics to get out the, er, word. WOMMA's Web site (womma.org) hosts blogs, podcasts, and e-mail newsletters to help teach marketers the basics on how to use the world's oldest form of advertising. WOMMA calls it "Word of Mouth Basic Training," or WOMBAT for short. "WOMBAT is the definitive resource for anyone ready to learn how to do word-of-mouth marketing the right way," says WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz, whose resume includes stints at GasPedal Ventures and the Association …

Advertising on blogs and in podcasts is beginning to take off. Both formats have proliferated in the past year, but while there are a few analytics tools available for blogs, there was nothing comparable for podcasts, until now. Podtrac, which launched late last year, is providing third-party audience measurement and ad sales services for advertisers and publishers of podcasts. Podtrac positions itself as a one-stop analytics shop for publishers of podcasts and advertisers. "We let advertisers know who's listening to which podcasts, and help them make media buys in those podcasts," says Podtrac CEO Mark McCrery. "One of the …

When channel surfing reveals the same old, same old, Dmitry Shapiro suggests upgrading to Television 2.0. That's this CEO's pet name for his beta baby, Veoh, an Internet television network to which film producers and broadcasters can upload fully featured, TV-quality shows gratis, at least for now. Viewers can download to their PC or iPod some of the 12,000 currently available videos, from "The Three Stooges" to "Iggy Cool and the Tentacles of Terror," about a crime-solving, surfing iguana. San Diego-based Veoh Networks, which launched in 2004, expects to make money through ad sales and commissions on pay-to-download selections …

Black Entertainment Television made its move into the mobile market last December, with downloadable ringtones for $1.99 to $2.99 a pop. The ringtones are promoted on about 50 percent of BET's music videos via 10- to 30-second pop-ups. The network expected to add news alerts and dating services by the end of the first quarter 2006. Tapping into the $10 billion mobile content industry is a smart move for the Viacom-owned cable network, given that African-Americans account for more than 25 percent of all spending on text messaging and ringtones. In fact, 37 percent of African-American cell phone owners …