Chili's "better than bland" ad campaign hinges on poking fun at a fake competitor -- P.J. Bland's, a restaurant chain that serves food literally made of cardboard. But while P.J. Bland's lacks an edible menu, most real restaurants would envy its Web presence.

Despite the usual hype this year around Super Bowl ads, one of the most talked about campaigns so far in 2009 couldn’t have been more different than one of those big-budget extravaganzas: Skittles-maker Mars and Agency.com, came up with the new site after asking themselves, “How can we sort of play up the unexpectedness of what Skittles is about?” according to Mars spokesperson Ryan Bowling.People who visited the new skittles.com, which launched on Feb. 27, were redirected to one of five rotating social media sites — Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia — and the chatter each contained concerning the …

If the click-through in display advertising were human, it would be someone to pity -- so few people have anything nice to say about it. In fact, the status of the display ad click is so low that some smarter advertisers are using it to get themselves better deals.

Twilight and The Unborn depended on online buzz to fill seats. Welcome to the tale of two films -- one a pop culture phenomenon that turned its actors into full-blown celebrities and the other a scary movie that brought in double its small budget.

Social Media is like the gateway drug for networkers (or maybe it is the crack). When Tech Crunch editor Eric Schonfeld tried posting his apartment listing in Cobble Hill on Twitter, Gawker posted his tweet. So, if you try to sell something through Twitter apparently you are really selling via Gawker.

Every cable operator wants to be Hulu now. Because if they're not, they could wind up a big old dump pipe instead. The fear of the dreaded dump-pipe possibility, coupled with the realization that there's gold in them there Internet-video hills, is driving cable operators to develop radically integrated methods of serving up their programming. But you can bet that the content and its platforms will remain in walled gardens -- with machine-gun snipers guarding access.

Friendster was on top of the social networking world when it applied for what some dubbed "the patent on social networking" back in 2003. By the time Friendster actually received the patent, in 2006, the site was already on the downside of a precipitous slide from relevance. But despite being passed in the American market by Facebook, MySpace, and numerous other social networking venues, Friendster is still alive and kicking, and continuing to pile up patents.

Fragmentation leads to different approaches My 2-year-old loves jigsaw puzzles. I mean, he loves them. I enjoy watching Ankur sort through a handful of chunky cardboard shapes, trying to find the right fit (and occasionally putting them in his mouth). On the one hand, I'm obviously proud of my child's interest in problem solving and hitting other developmental milestones,but it's also fun to watch him experiment with trial and error.It reminds me quite a bit of how online marketing has matured. Consider the good old days of interactive marketing, back when you only had a few channels at your …

TiVo might be a verb, but it's not an action for most of the younger generation. Instead, Internet television is the preferred digital video recorder for the youth of America. When they miss a show, they're opting for online video over a dvr, according to new evidence from Solutions Research Group.

The music industry has never been more challenged - okay, threatened - in its entire existence than it is now. Still, creative marketing (take Pearl Jam's Ten game in this issue, for example) and a return to grassroots has given it new hope. From Radiohead's groundbreaking decision to let people download their album online and decide how much they want to pay, to John Mellencamp and his label focusing on exposing his work through commercials as opposed to radio, the business and the artist are, believe it or not, bouncing back.