LONDON (AdAge.com) -- What kind of brand would want to associate with Chatroulette? Well, French Connection -- of FCUK fame -- would, and the U.K.-based clothing retailer is using the random, anonymous chat room for a marketing push.

ADOTAS – Yahoo! vet Cheryl Kellond has joined the management team at Panache, taking on the role of executive vice president. With 15 years in the industry, Kellond was previously vice president of advertiser product marketing.

With the promotions of Calvin Wong to chief operating officer; Sushene Swenson to vice president of finance; and Jeremy Greenspan to vice president of Midwest sales, appssavvy added three new employees. Most recently East Coast sales manager for Betawave, Greg Ellis was appointed East Coast sales director. Sara Madsen, previously account director of client relations was named client strategist. Formerly the marketing manager for Gameloft, Kelly Gudahl has taken on the responsibilities of account manager.

PostRelease has appointed automotive digital marketing expert Tyler Tanaka to the new position of account director.

SEMPO announced the results of the election for its board of directors. Returning to the board are Chris Boggs, director of search engine optimization for ROSETTA; Massimo Burgio, founder and chief strategist for Global Search Interactive; Bruce Clay, president of Bruce Clay, Inc.; Dave Fall, SVP of product and operations of Clickable; Kevin Lee, CEO of Didit; and Jeffrey Pruitt, CEO of Acendant. New faces on the board include Rob Garner, strategy director for iCrossing; Mike Grehan, VP and global content director for Incisive Media; Kristjan Mar Hauksson, director of search and owner of Nordic eMarketing;Motoko Hunt, president and Japanese search strategist of AJPR; Dmitriy Minenko, online specialist in search engine marketing for Tourism British Columbia; Margaret Willette, search marketing manager for Intuit; and Michael Y. Xu, SVP of Beijing Gridsum Technology.

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Seven months after an initial blitz of advertising surrounding the health-care reform bill, various parties are at it again in response to President Barack Obama's push to have the Senate version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives before Easter on April 4.

Maybe things haven't changed that much at all. Maybe what's missing in our "social" marketing transformation is the really boring and basic stuff. Maybe dull drives digital. Maybe fundamentals face us forward. Maybe boring is breakthrough.

China Central Television's Lunar New Year extravaganza may not be the the world's most sophisticated variety show, but it is probably the biggest, with over 730 million viewers.

MRI Starch Communications looked at which 2009 consumer print ads caught the attention of young men and women. Our slideshow of print ads that had the most "stopping power" among young men and women reveals there are some differences, as you might expect, but when it comes to a crisp glass of imported beer, or a close-up of a flatbread melt, apparently we aren't so different after all.

ADOTAS – A user’s Twitter homepage is limited to a link and 140 characters. It’s nothing like a fan page on Facebook, which offer a world of engagement options for brands via polls and the sharing of content. Many brands on Twitter will link back to their Facebook fan pages, which Moran argues makes for a bad user experience.

“My Twitter life is more about my professional side and the marketing world, while Facebook is more a private situation,” Moran said. “I wouldn’t necessarily become a friend or fan of a brand on Facebook that I may follow on Twitter.”

So Fuze Box — which also offers Fuze Meeting, Fuze Messenger and Fuze Movie — has leveraged its platform to bring a centralized way for brands and others to share content on Twitter. As a content outpost, the free service Tweetshare offers a social alternative to static landing pages and basically offers the ability to create fan pages for Twitter.

“We want to create that same environment where companies and brands and, heck, anyone who wants to create a fan page can and have a better experience of sharing content, getting feedback and engaging with the Twitter community,” Moran said. “Think of it as YouTube meets Scripps meets Twitter.”

Tweetshare users can upload content ranging from HD video and PowerPoint presentations to images and other documents. Every form of content is optimized for the medium, whether it’s on the web or iPhone. The platform also offers the ability to build polls around uploaded content to engage audiences.

“If you attach a poll to a photo or a short video, it’s amazing how many more people will interact than just a comment box,” Moran observed.

Tweetshare pages are highly customizable in design. Ten contributors can add content onto a fan page — anything they upload into Tweetshare as well as anything they tweet will appear on the page. In addition, the platform threads replies to tweets to form conversations quite similar to Facebook; replies to posts on Tweetshare are reposted as tweets.

“Twitter is notoriously difficult for newbies and pros alike trying to follow the stream because it goes by so fast and it’s not a threaded discussion,” Moran said. “There’s no reason to be shy about it — we’re okay with looking a bit like Facebook fan pages because we want the interface to be intuitive, but still based on your Twitter ID.”

In addition, Tweetshare provides real-time analytics on the number of people visiting the fan pag, how long they’re staying, what they’re viewing and more.
There’s also an API available to post from Tweetshare to Facebook fan page.

Fuze Box has also released an iPhone app to upload photos, videos and other content directly from your 3G network to Tweetshare and build a discussion automatically.

It’s well known there’s friction between posting stuff on Twitter and the web; various apps have facilitated this process for the consumer, but the marketer or brand trying to share more valuable content runs into road blocks, Moran said.

“We think there’s a gap there for Twitter fan pages and we’re excited to fill it,” he added. “We’re not trying to replace your Twitter stream, just augment it.”

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LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Dora the Explorer, Nickelodeon's cartoon preschool heroine, is turning 10 -- or should we say, diez? -- and has a host of marketing partners to help her celebrate, from State Farm to the U.S. Census.

ADOTAS – Ever since I read it as a boy, Ray Bradbury’s story 1953 “The Murderer” has haunted me. In the near future a psychologist visits a patient at an insane asylum who has given himself the moniker of “the Murderer” — he doesn’t slay humans, but any piece of technology that bombards him with media, advertising, communication and propaganda. When the psychologist enters the Murderer’s cell, he immediately grabs the doctor’s wristwatch/communication/media consumption device and smashes it.

Every day I see that future inching closer into being — when I read the time on my first cell phone I immediately thought to the scene in which the Murderer smashes the watch. That flashback hit me again the first time I saw someone watching TV on on a mobile.

I’m a sucker for art that suggests the lunatics are running the asylum. One of my favorite Pink Floyd songs in “Brain Damage,” which includes the classic line: “The lunatics are in my hall/the paper keeps their folded faces to the floor/and every day the paperboy brings more.” “The Murderer” fits well into this category — is he really the crazy one when the rest of us seem to be sucking on a digital media and social networking IV drip?

A study of 200 student iPhone users (70% of who have had their phones less than a year) by Stanford University found that 10% consider themselves completely addicted to the device while 34% marked a four on a five-point addiction scale. Another 32% fear becoming an iPod junkie any day now. Only 6% claimed they were not addicted at all.

Three quarters of the students said they fell asleep with their iPhones in bed with them while 69% said they are more likely to forget their wallet than their iPhone. Forty-one percent said losing their iPhone would be a tragedy — I wonder if it would be as murderous as “King Lear.” About 25% of those surveyed said they consider the iPhone an extension of themselves — why do I keep hearing the Doctor Who theme song and thinking of Cybermen?

Apparently this might not be a bad addiction, the Stanford researchers say. Seventy percent of the students claimed the iPhone made them more organized while 54% swore they were more productive because of the device.

“I don’t think it is really unhealthy. I think they really like their iPhone[s],” the survey overseer told TechNewsDaily. Quick — somebody get her a Nobel Prize!

Still I’m not going to jump on the “My god! It’s an epidemic!” bandwagon. I can’t help thinking of the media hysteria surrounding “Walkmen zombies! and then “Discmen zombies!” and then “iPod zombies!” “iPad zombies!” may be next, but the “iPhone widow” — when a significant other is squeezed out by the homewrecking device — could beat it to the sensationalist headlines.

However, media addiction has been on the rise in our culture for a long time — my favorite quote recently was from The New Yorker’s George Packer, who called Twitter crack for media addicts. It’s one thing to be hooked into the media vastness that is the Internet via a laptop or desktop, but the gradual switch to mobile sets off some alarms — 56% of public wifi users surveyed by Jiwire used a mobile device or smartphone to access the Internet. A PC you can step away from; the mobile you take everywhere so you can get a fix whenever you want.

I guess acknowledging you have a problem is the first step, and it’s actually strangely relieving that 15% of these students recognize that they’re becoming media addicts. Thing is, media addiction is not a bad thing for interactive advertisers. I received a press release the other day in which a company gloated it had the most addictive games for the iPhone. If people are always hooked into the stream, there’s limitless opportunities to engage them.

But do you want to reach users or junkies? Because getting through to junkies is next to impossible.

Alas I’m no “Murderer.” I’m even nudging the higher powers at Adotas to hook a brutha up with an iPhone. However, I plan to keep on reading books on the subway (unless Adotas  or Apple — wink, wink — hooks a brutha up with an iPad) and no mobile device will take the place of stuffed bunny Mr. Fluffles in my bed.

(Another great satirical short story about being overwhelmed by media, particularly centered on digital advertising, is “My Flamboyant Grandson” by George Saunders. In this future, strips stitched into shoes help target holographic pop-up ads in real life. Anyone in this industry should be thoroughly amused.)

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ADOTAS – Minimalism has no place in interactive advertising — the more features the merrier. However, one should never stray too far from the classics. Hence why Liquidus has upgraded its inventory-displaying rich media banners to feature custom branded messages, tossing a little tradition in with innovation.

Integrated into the BannerLink offering, customers can create a “brand-focused” sticker-esque ad on top of the
searchable product inventory or an animation that shares space. When a user rolls over the ad, the branded message disappears and the banner expands to display the listed inventory in a video slideshow. Clicking on pieces of inventory gives more details and images within the banner, which also offers sorting controls.

Along with this enhancement, Liquidus has introduced more BannerLink features such as interactive Google mapping technology, multi-seller BannerLinks, advanced product sort options and new ad template styles.

“In order to meet the demand of our advertiser clients, we needed to provide them means to deliver their brand message as well the breadth of their product offering,” said Chris Carlton, executive creative director and co-founder of Liquidus.

Liquidus reports that BannerLink interaction rates have averaged close to 20% since the product’s launch, significantly higher than the average interaction rate of 2.11% for other rich media ads.

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ADOTAS – You can’t help but notice the rapidly increasing number of brand protection vendors, but why do we need these companies? We didn’t have them before so why do we need them now?

Writing on behalf of the pioneer in this space (we delivered the first brand-safe network impressions in 2006), I hope to shed some light on this technology and explain why it is vital for every company that advertises online.

The idea of negative side effects of branded ads appearing next to controversial content — such as an airline ad running alongside news of a plane crash — are obvious. In recent years we have seen truly horrendous examples of ad misplacements. The market has moved from relative ignorance to greater adoption.

Demand comes from all sectors of the industry as a gap is plugged in the service offering of these organizations. There are, however, misconceptions about what brand protection actually means.

There have been many different approaches for brand protection. Companies have experimented, for instance, with developing lists of “clean sites” only to find that the problems exist at page level. But which pages? The same is also true of using site tags whereby publishers classify their content at site or section level. But what sites or sections?

Problems also exist with a human site vetting approach, which is both time-consuming and also hugely subjective, as it depends on who is doing the vetting and is subject to that person’s bias and opinion. Some have developed a list of “bad” keywords to solve the problem only to find that, because words have different senses or meanings, this method is useless.

Another approach is to fence off content into a “brand safe network” of pre-crawled sites. Sounds pretty idyllic but as market dynamics dictate, the costs would be above market average prices. It also brings back the issue of subjectivity. A network of content without any campaign variations is not a totally brand-safe proposition.

So if not these methods, how can we make brand protection actually work?

Most effective brand protection technologies involve some form of semantics — analysis of the words on the page to identify key concepts that could potentially be considered controversial by an advertiser and, more important, a potential customer. The semantic analysis identifies key concepts of a page and upon detection of controversial content, either reports the misplacement and enables the user to take action, or compares the page content to a predetermined approved/banned list of controversial content and blocks the ad impression from being delivered.

Brand protection technology also brings the marketer so much more actionable information. Full URL level transparency is a key element enhanced by such technology; as we move to a more automated future with the growth of ad exchanges, demand-side platforms and real-time bidding, transparency will be among the biggest weapons in the arsenal.

Visibility into where each and every impression has been delivered — right down to the individual page URL –- will be a prerequisite of any solution. Totally blind delivery will soon be passé.

Different brand protection solutions approach the problem in different ways thus they arrive at different, and in some cases incorrect, conclusions. Some pre-crawl the data or conduct near or real-time analysis, extracting page content and identifying its brand protection criteria.

It is vital, however, that the content upon which the analysis is based is the same as that seen by the reader at the time of loading the page which is not possible with pre-crawling. User-generated content can also change a previously “clean” page into one that an advertiser needs to avoid.

Dynamic content is a game changer and while its benefits for the publisher (e.g. interaction with the users, increased content lifecycle, SEO, etc.) are tangible, the potential pitfalls for the advertiser are serious. Because of this, an effective brand protection solution must use a blend of real-time analysis supported by historic crawled data.

The concept that brand protection is “one size fits all” with providers determining what content is “controversial” is faulty; what is “safe” for one advertiser is not necessarily the case for another, even within the same sector. Needs change from client to client and campaign to campaign so any preordained idea of brand protection simply does not work.

To put it bluntly, brand protection is not media verification and media verification is not brand protection. There is a lot of confusion about these two points as well as a lot of smoke and mirrors.

The idea that brand protection is there to audit the placement and position of ads within the confines of a media plan is a misnomer. Brand protection is a preemptive technology and is designed to block ads from appearing next to controversial content. The technology, by definition, removes the need to audit — there are no questionable placements to assess, no screenshots to be taken and no axe to grind with publishers, networks or distribution partners.

Brand protection is about preventing ad misplacements, hence protecting brands from potentially damaging negative associations resulting out of negative content adjacencies.

The industry is about to enter one of its most exciting times. An explosion of content on the web and new industry technologies such as real-time bidding will free brands to explore the richness and diversity available.

Brand protection technologies will encourage more top advertisers to enter the online advertising sector while simultaneously allowing other more established online brands to expand beyond the “safe” path of leading portals and sites into a whole new but equally relevant portfolio. With brand protection technologies in place, brands will be free to explore and enjoy the economies of scale.

The importance of a brand protection strategy for all future display media campaigns cannot be underestimated. Not having such a strategy in place is like adding more bullets into a game of Russian Roulette.

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- YouTube has spent the past year putting ads in every corner of the site, from big, splashy homepage ads to pre-roll, post-roll and overlays on video. But one aspect has remained curiously ad-free: its mobile site.

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Hilton Hotels has placed its creative advertising account in review, a spokesman said.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- As the beverage industry comes under assault with proposed sugar taxes in several parts of the county, normally fierce rivals Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Dr Pepper Snapple Group have begun running print and TV ads touting their joint initiative to remove full-calorie soft drinks from schools across the country.

ADOTAS – The Rubicon Project is taking it’s revenue optimization to the mobile world. Through a partnership with mobile ad platform mOcean Mobile, REVV for mobile (RFM) will give premium publishers a platform to match each mobile ad impression with the highest paying demand source.

Integrated within the REVV for publishers platform, RFM will offer campaign creation and creative trafficking across multiple platforms as well as integration with all major third-party ad networks. In addition the mobile offering features real-time reporting, landing page creation and optimization by network, site and zone.

“Mobile inventory is growing quickly as a contributor to our publishers’ overall advertising revenue, so it was imperative we select a partner that could deliver the right technology and services,” said Craig Roah, COO and founder of Rubicon. “We chose to work with mOcean Mobile because they offer the most mature mobile ad serving product on the market, a best-in-class user interface and a team that is staffed with industry veterans.

Dave Gwordz, CEO of mOcean’s parent company, Mojiva, said he believed Rubicon’s mobile offering would bring much-needed ad serving efficiency to the space.

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Looks as if someone else may have their knickers in a twist over the way two Super Bowl commercials featuring pantsless actors were aired back to back during the game.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The $100 million lawsuit pop-tart Lindsay Lohan filed against E-Trade Financial Corp. this week over a 30-second Super Bowl spot from its agency Grey, New York, appears to have been a crowdsourced effort by friends and random fans of Ms. Lohan on Twitter.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Pharma giant Pfizer has consolidated under Carat all of its media buying for Wyeth DTC brands, industry executives say. The additional business was previously handled in-house by the Wyeth division and is estimated to be worth some $250 million in billings.

Marketers and agencies may at last surrender to the inevitable logic in having women not just create, but manage the development of conversations with other women.

ADOTAS – Don’t call it a social networking site, CEO and co-founder Garrett Camp says about categorizing StumbleUpon in the social mediascape. He prefers either “social or content discovery” network.

Marc Leibowitz, VP of business development and marketing and a Google AdWords vet, chimes in: “We consider StumbleUpon more complementary to things like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook in that people use those mediums to post things as a way of expressing themselves and communicating with others, while Stumble is how they find stuff in the first place.”

If Facebook and Twitter are where the online masses converse, StumbleUpon is where they find the goods to fuel the conversation. Instead of being anchored around the person, the site is buoyed by its content – a prospect that should increasingly intrigue advertisers, especially ones interested in marketing with branded content, to try the revamped StumbleAds system with its in-depth analytics.

With a few hundred thousand stumblers joining the throng every month, StumbleUpon is nearing 10 million registered users, a third of which are highly active. In general, the site receives about 11 million unique visitors a month. The number of stumbles per month exceeds 600 million (an average of 300 per user), and 5% of those are paid inclusions.

The ad system makeover is designed to ease advertisers into the world of paid inclusion by offering them familiar features, ones they’ve grown accustomed to working with AdWords and AdSense. The initial ad system was set quickly in March 2006 — “Right after we started focusing on making money,” Camp quips. It’s served its purpose and driven enough traffic to keep advertisers coming back but the feature set was too basic — there was no CSV export and advertisers could only pay via PayPal.

The revamp is about bringing the system up to par — all the goodies that appealed to marketers are still there while now StumbleAds offers a wealth of colorful analytics and features, as well as an interface that paints a picture of the background mechanics. The graphical analytics offerings are now as souped up as Google’s, giving users the ability to manipulate date ranges and view the effective cost-per stumble.

Advertisers can now manage several campaigns at once and contrast them to determine the most effective on cost-per-view. The new design matches the rest of the site, offers more options on the “create” page and will be integrated with StumbleUpon’s URL shortener Su.pr.

“Something that intrigued me about Stumble was that they built this model around something that doesn’t involve AdSense at all,” Leibowitz notes. “I lived and breathed AdSense for my entire seven years at Google and it’s weird to come across something on the web that’s advertising-based that isn’t based around AdSense.”

The challenge Leibowitz sees for Stumble is similar to the one Google faced in the early day of search ads — educating advertisers on the value of paid inclusion. With Stumble there’s no banner, no text link, no ad unit — nothing intent driven at all. Advertising with the network is about discovery.

“Advertisers have been conditioned by Google and followers that it’s all about the click and optimizing the 10 words you get in your three-line search ad,” Leibowitz says. “But here there is no click.”

“There is no ad,” Camp interjects.

Leibowitz nods. “It’s full-page, full attention content blended seamlessly into the organic stream of content, rated and reviewed like anything else.”

Adjusting advertisers to this notion has required a fair deal of hand holding. While relationships with advertisers have been casual in the past, the Stumble team is now reaching out and giving tips and advice, offering real-world experience with campaigns that have worked well — as well as those abhorred by the community.

“If advertisers invest just a small amount of time in playing with Stumble, they get it and see dramatic results,” Leibowitz says. A starting point: Don’t put in your homepage, but the actual article or blog.

The process is somewhat akin to permission marketing: users can rate any paid inclusion the same as a normal page, Users won’t necessarily know they’re looking at a paid inclusion because the content is something that would eventually be stumbled upon. In essence, advertisers are buying targeted traffic.

“Basically our users are saying it’s okay to send them some targeted places because we’re going to do our best to leverage everything they’ve said in the past about what they like into showing them the best,” Camp said. “It’s a lot more relevant than the advertising you typically see, and even though it doesn’t have any contextual targeting like a search ad, it’s more behavioral than most ad networks.”

Camp cites that he rated many BusinessWeek articles/ads that showed up in his stumbles simply because he found them entertaining — to him they weren’t ads, but additions to his content stream.

The neat part about this? Content that is really good and recommended by large parts of the community will receive a great deal of free traffic. This can be viewed graphically in the analytics, in which a bar chart shows the percentage of paid stumbles versus the free ones. The best content will garner three or four times the paid views, at which point it’s legitimately viral.

A Brief History of Stumbling

StumbleUpon has been providing diversion and resources for web surfers for eight years now. Started by Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd while Camp was at graduate school in Calgary, the site bloomed in popularity during the time he was working on thesis.

“By the time I graduated, instead of getting a job, I decided to work on Stumble,” Camp says.

In 2006, the Stumblers moved their act to the haven of venture capital, San Francisco, and picked up Angel funding. The company was only independent for 18 months, which saw a growth from 800,000 users to 2.4 million, before being scooped up eBay in May 2007. While Stumble was still independent as a division within eBay, Camp realized the company could grow faster if it was separated.

“The bigger the company, the less flexible you are. If you want to do something quickly you have to ask for permissions, approvals…” Camp said. “A lot of times we wanted to make quick decisions and we felt we were moving too slowly.”

The team wanted to get back that startup energy and be nimble. There were a lot of ideas brewing, but finding the right talent to bring them to life became difficult. Many hotshot engineers are more interested in working for venture-capital-funded startups that have more equity and room to grow. A company that’s been acquired is generally considered passed its growth spurt — and StumbleUpon didn’t feel like they were at that point.

Almost fortuitously, eBay’s upper echelon decided to refocus on its core auction offering, which had nothing to do with Stumble. It didn’t take a lot persuasion to buy back the company.

Over the last 16-18 months, Camp and crew have sought to simplify the site and service on both the consumer and ad-selling sides. The initial big boost for the service in the mid-2000s came from being one of the top-rated browser plug-ins for Firefox. Being the 138th extension (consider that there are more than 10,000 now) was quite good for name recognition and the growth of the company. But the team wanted to refocus on users engaging with the website.

After a site redesign that included a tool for stumbling without logging in and the addition of the URL shortener Su.pr, the web part is now the fastest growing of all Stumble’s products. While 90% to 100% of stumbling in the past was through the toolbar, in the last year that’s down to 60%. A third of stumbles are now from the website or a social networking extension.

While the Stumble team may not consider the site a social network, they have been increasingly adding social networking tools to the site –- among the many clustering technologies used by the site, recommendations from the Stumble engine are partially driven by friends preferences or people with similar tastes as you. On the front-end, users can share pages with friends and encourage them to rate them. Users can also see others who gave kudos to a page and follow their recommendations. After hooking up with Facebook connect, the Stumblers are developing friend import.

The remodeled ad system is the next step in “Phase 4,” as Camp calls it. By drawing more traffic to the website and offering bountiful and straightforward analytics, he aims to boost advertiser revenue. Several large media publishers took part in the beta testing — HuffingtonPost in particular drove a lot of interest in its paid stumbles.

But the ad system can be a resource for content and media makers of all sizes — even independent musicians and photographers. Anyone who is making something new, anyone who has a website and is seeking attention, Camp says, should be able to greatly benefit from the revamped ad system.

Right now the options are very topical and media-focused, he admits. The next steps for the ad system include adding temporal — which will be advantageous for restaurants and physical retailers — and geotargeting options,  which could draw the interest of a lot of political advertisers, especially in an election year.

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