Why are marketers missing the mark with this busy online audience?

Engaging young eyeballs online? That's entertainment....

A quick and dirty guide to digging for info about your site --and others'.

Omma Editor Tobi Elkin talks to ValueClick Media's general manager, David A. Yovanno.

Why are advertisers still so reluctant to pursue branding opportunities within video games? The biggest reason: There's still no third-party measurement and ratings support for this $10 billion industry. Nielsen Interactive Entertainment promised a universal games ratings system by mid-2005, but Nielsen now says the system may not be ready until mid-2007. NIE senior vice president Michael Dowling admits the delay may keep some advertisers away from video games, but he insists there's a bright future for dynamic, in-game advertising in the next generation of game consoles. As gamers trade in their old Xboxes and PlayStations for …

As pay-per-click advertising has grown, the task of tracking and managing campaigns has mushroomed in complexity, overwhelming media agencies trying to keep up with multiple campaigns by big brand clients. "Many agencies have told us that one of their biggest problems is juggling all the campaigns their clients are doing online," says Seb Bishop, chief marketing officer of Miva Inc., the performance marketing network formerly known as Find-What.com. "That has meant logging in separately to track and manage each individual campaign." To address this, Miva launched Agency Center 1.0, a tool designed to alleviate the growing pains …

Making a cutting-edge product truly universal means domesticating it for popular consumption. Few companies do that better than Kodak. With its Simply Pictures Web site (www.kodak.com/go/simplypictures), Kodak brings the latest in digital photography and printing into the middle-class suburban home. The site, designed by Avenue A/Razorfish, Seattle, shows a virtual home on One Kodak Lane, through which visitors can travel. Visitors to the kitchen get tips on organizing a scrapbook with layouts from craft expert Sandi Genovese of the DIY Network. In the family room, visitors learn how to create a bound digital photo album and design a "doggie …

Plenty of high-flying enterprises have fallen by sticking too closely to what they've already accomplished and missing chances to blaze new trails. Google seems intent, even obsessed, with avoiding this fate. Starting out as a search technology firm, it has quickly morphed into an online advertising giant now taking on all media. That's one way of explaining the search giant's acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting, a digital solutions provider for the radio industry, whose technology automates functions connected with selling, buying, and scheduling radio ads. The firm's automation software allows a potential advertiser to search for a particular …

Until now, rich media advertising was an activity limited to those marketers with either the money or the technical chops to internally develop sophisticated Flash-enabled campaigns. DoubleClick's latest version of Dart Motif is designed to change all that -- to make rich media advertising easily accessible to advertisers who've been left out of the party. The latest version launched last December and allows designers to convert formats with a single click by selecting among various templates of rich ads. Compatible with Firefox and Netscape 8, Dart Motif also includes user interface-based authoring tools that allow designers with no formal …

As Time Inc. struggles to squeeze its old media fanny into new media attire, the company's myriad print titles would be wise to emulate Sports Illustrated, which, with SI.com/Swimsuit, offered the ultimate case study on dynamic online advertising. Beyond the tawny skin and siren gazes, the site is stocked with display ads from Budweiser, Planters Peanuts, Coca-Cola's energy drink Vault, and DaimlerChrysler's Dodge brand. Visitors can stream dozens of free videos that are surrounded by pre-roll for the Honda Civic, or buy them from Apple's iTunes music store for $1.99 apiece. There's also a Kid Rock music video, "Rock …