When people on Madison Avenue discuss the creation of an ideal advertising system that will one day enable marketers to figure out the perfect way of delivering their ad messages to the right people, at the right time, and with the right effects, they typically refer to it as a "Holy Grail."

I'm sitting in a conference room at 11 Madison Avenue, a facility that has become part of a new wpp laboratory for inventing the "agency of the future." At least that's what its chief scientist, Torrence Boone, is telling me, as he scrutinizes a series of boards surrounding us on the room's walls.

When Skittles gave its landing page over to a Twitter feed, much hand-wringing, fingerwagging and prognosticating over what it meant to new-media marketing ensued. But an awful lot of hot air was wasted, because ultimately the experiment probably didn't mean very much at all in the grand scheme of things.

In 2007, as the cola wars intensified and consumers kept backing away from carbonated soft drinks, Pepsi-Cola turned its attention to a demographic that still very much cared what it put into its body - young men with a thirst for challenge, competition, camaraderie and carbonation.

It's amazing how much more stuff you can cram into your brain when you actually have a desk," says a fresh-faced Michael Dory, research director for the newly launched Socialbomb.

Tools of the Trade Are all media created equal?

Whether it is a welcome bit of techno optimism in an otherwise dour market, or the enduring legacy of denial on the Web, San Francisco-based microblogging service Twitter is living the online vida loca. Twitter - founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams - leapt into the No. 3 spot for all social networks in February, right behind giants Facebook and MySpace, according to TNS's Compete.com.ea

Many have called the lovely city of Atlanta home: Whitney Houston, the elegant and dignified cast of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and, of course, Kris Zagoria, CEO and founder of Moxie Interactive. This month marks the ninth anniversary of the shop. Launched with just five employees. the team has expanded to 285, with outposts in New York and Los Angeles, and is under the Publicis Groupe umbrella after being acquired by ZenithOptimedia in 2006.

In February of this year, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google jointly announced their support for a new tag you can put in your page to tell the bots what the true canonical url of that page is. What is a canonical url and why is it important the engines have come up with a solution? Fair questions. Let's explore the answers.

It's going to take more than a recession to get people to skip their daily jolt of java. Starbucks, the grand dame of designer coffee, and Dunkin' Donuts, the regular joe, are taking radically different marketing approaches to keep caffeine cravers addicted to their brands.