A few sobering statistics: Newspaper ad sales dropped more than 28 percent for the first quarter of 2009, according to the Newspaper Association of America; more than 40,000 newspaper jobs were lost in 2009, figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal; and weekday newspaper sales fell by 10.62 percent from April 1, 2009 to September 30, 2009, while Sunday circulation dropped 7.49 percent for the same period, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reports. While there are no statistics available on this, we can only assume that newspaper delivery boys and girls across the country have lost their routes.

In 2009, you couldn't tell if the market for display advertising was coming back or finally falling off a cliff. Revenue numbers were all over the map. When some CPM stats early in the year indicated declining CPMs, and the largest display seller, Yahoo, reported a revenue drop, several pundits warned that the notoriously low click-through rates and infinite supply finally had caught up with a "broken" display economy.

We learned quite a lot about Hulk Hogan while working on this issue. Everyone probably already knows the Hulkster played the wrestler Thunderlips in Rocky III, but did you know he was big in Japan and wrestled there for years? Fans there call him "Ichiban." He once had a restaurant called Pastamania in the Mall of America, and was the original choice of pitchman for The George Foreman Grill but turned it down to sell a blender. And last but not least, The American Mustache Institute tells us they believe "Hogan's lower nose garment is the largest naturally grown, farm-raised …

For Hollywood studios, the advent of social networking is a lot like the early days of nuclear energy: studios are learning to harness the power of Facebook and Twitter, but often become horribly irradiated, too. The downside associated with youthful, smart-phone equipped moviegoers communicating instantaneously with all the friends in their networks began to emerge last year, when Universal's Sacha Baron Cohen comedy Bruno debuted to a strong $14.2 million Friday, then cratered 40 percent the following day.

Once again, a solution to an ad problem lies in the creative. Recent studies have found that engagement rates with ads are three to four times higher when a marketer uses customized spots, with tailored creative and interactive features, than they are for pre-roll ads.

Without a doubt, the Web has been good to bacon. Closet bacon fanatics have united around recipes for bacon chocolates, bacon vodka and the culty "Bacon Explosion" meatloaf. Now Hormel's Spam, another underestimated pork product, wants some of that online action.

BOOK EXCERPT: It's time to set our sights on the very foundation of consumer behavior itself: the marketing funnel, aka A.I.D.A. (the theory, not the opera) - Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. It is widely held to be the simplest and most accurate way of describing the four states or behaviors that almost all consumers experience - from being blissfully unaware of a product, service, offer or idea that they never knew they needed to the point at which they actually make some kind of commitment (usually monetary) to purchase, invest in, or acquire that item.

Think you know what integrated marketing is? Think again. While 2009 was a year of chaos, 2010 will be a year of consolidation, according to a new white paper from Media Logic. "There is no question that the old model of marketing, dependent upon an isolated and passive consumer, is dead, never to return," says Ronald Ladouceur, Media Logic's first senior vice president and executive creative director.

Already a seasoned media professional, 29-year-old Ezra Cooperstein was recently appointed CEO of Maker Studios - a studio focused primarily on YouTube as a platform, which aggregates Web content providers with eager audiences to form potent online video networks.

If National Geographic is known for anything, it is for spectacular photographs of animals, landscapes and breasts. Oh, fess up: Who among us didn't spend hours thumbing through National Geographic magazine as kids looking for the boob shots? (For those of you who never got enough, National Geographic published National Geographic: The Best of the Breasts, a compendium of breast photography from the magazine, last year.) When it came to redesigning nationalgeographic.com, the in-house team at National Geographic Digital Media (NGDM) aimed to produce "a clean, straightforward site that focused on the content itself - all of the great …