UPS' cardboard world wows visually, but is it the right package? You are always urged to think outside the box in business. But Doner was thinking inside the box -- more specifically, inside the cardboard box -- when the agency launched a microsite nestled within a cardboard box as part of The UPS Store's integrated Cardboard World campaign. "Our challenge in the brief was to bring Cardboard World to life online in an interactive way and tell the story of how TheUPS Store is more than just shipping," explains Justin Smith, Doner executive vice president/executive creative director for interactive.

In 2000, we were all rushing to proclaim the arrival of the efficient marketplace. Analysts lined up to write paeans to the logical beauty of e-procurement. Billions and trillions of dollars would grease the wheels of ecommerce, flowing from business to business in clean, straight and rational lines. It all made so much sense: the stripping away of all the messy decision making, ruthlessly commoditizing the Business-to-Business (B2B) market, driving buying through simple value equations.

It's likely you never heard about Intel's 90-day trial for Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers. That's because the wireless network is built into patients homes. Using numerous types of motion and weight sensors and radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, patients' daily activities are monitored and recorded.

Advertisers love search stats, but maybe there's a better way to get ahead of the curve on consumers' actions. BlueKai thinks they have it nailed. The company is now issuing a quarterly index of consumer intent action across the Web. Dubbed BlueKai Pulse, the free report reflects data trends and insights from the BlueKai Data Exchange, which aggregates the anonymous intent data of over 145 million unique users on top-tier U.S. e-commerce, online travel agency and auto comparison sites.

The online advertising marketplace has seen its fair share of arms race-like tit-for-tat technology battles over the years. Whether it was between spammers and spam filters or pop-up ads and pop-up blockers, our largely self-regulated industry has technologies battling for supremacy all the time -- the battle currently being waged between sellers of online display advertising and buyers of that inventory is fundamentally different..

Clicks have made us fat and lazy. And when we wind up set in our ways, there's only one solution -- weaning. In this case, we need to be weaned off the click. That's what the online marketing world needs right now to improve branding, according to eMarketer and experts it surveyed across the Internet ad business.

The marketing brains behind Sharpie markers once thought their brand's biggest claim to fame was that celebrities liked to sign autographs with the pens. Most people used the markers to label moving boxes or leftovers in the freezer, but the autograph thing linked the prosaic felt-tip to glitzy names like Tori Spelling, Jessica Simpson and David Beckham. In fact, last year Sharpie built its ad campaign around soccer heartthrob Beckham.

Today's teens are not the couch potatoes we expect. It's no joke that teens are hard to reach, online or off. Well it is a joke, but they are actually hard to reach. We have statistics. But the money they have to spend is just ridiculous.

Consumers are spending more on outdoor living items, giving a much-needed boost to category retailers and marketers this year, according to Research and Markets' "Outdoor Living Trend Report 2009," released Sept. 1. Spending on outdoor living items rose 22.6 percent from 2007 to 2008.

Who do you go to for news? More and more, we are relying on our Personal News Networks. Updates from Facebook and Twitter are now central to people's information networks, much like bulletins from news wires or major dailies. I guess that's not really so surprising, is it? One of the first things they teach in journalism school is that a tragedy in my neighborhood elicits a greater emotional response than 100 tragedies in my country or 1,000 in a far-off land.