Last night during the Oscars, I saw a commercial from VW that literally made me laugh out loud while sitting on my couch. BTW, my wife is a huge Reese Witherspoon fan so it was a good Oscar experience all around. Volkswagan ran the third installment of their ”Un-pimp Your Ride” campaign. What was brilliant about this commercial is not only that it made me laugh, but also it was effective:They did an excellent job at making me remember it was VW behind the commercial. Not all funny commercials do such a good job of this. It has virally spread across the Internet...

I’ve heard about Rollyo for the past few months and decided to finally take it for a spin myself. I’m already addicted and a huge Rollyo fan. Wilth Rollyo, individuals can “roll” their own personalized vertical searches by specifying up to 25 web site per search. Within just a couple minutes, I had an account created and launched my first “searchroll”, the eMedia Web. With the eMedia Web, you can now search all major online media / publishing web sites at one time. I have integrated it into the sidebar of my blog site or you can go directly to the eMedia Web...

I saw an interesting email today sent to a publisher from that publisher’s ISP. The ISP said it received a “valid claim” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that materials on the publisher’s web site may violate copyright interests. Apparently the ISP was contacted by attorneys from a major film/TV company that had identified an article on that site as the location of the infraction. While the attorneys did not identify what the offending material was, the article did mention in passing the name of a subsidiary of the film/TV company along with...

I haven’t updated my blog in quite some time — the rapid pace of Penton’s growth in emedia has kept me incredibly busy and while it’s energizing, fun, and always different, when I go home at night it’s been hard to get back in front of a computer and work some more on the web for personal projects like this blog. But I have found new inspiration and energy and am more committed than ever now to keep my blog updated. As you can see, I’ve relaunched eMedia Strategist and moved my blog over to a true blogging package — WordPress. I also will be...

Although it’s been talked about before, today’s Research Brief from the Center for Media Research finally said out loud what many of us have known for quite some time, “Online Ad Budgets [are] Stolen from Traditional.” The article quotes Forrester’s report showing US online advertising reaching $26 billion by 2010. Similar rosy reports abound from eMarketer’s projections of paid search spending up 40% in 2005, to the March ABM Online Revenue Strategies summit in New York where everyone was talking about large double-digit growth in their online businesses....

Well, I finally did it — I cancelled my subscription to MediaPost’s email newsletter, Just an Online Minute. This used to be one of my favorite online marketing / emedia newsletters and one that I would religiously read each week. No longer… Ever since the departure of Masha Geller the newsletter just hasn’t been the same. I’m sure the folks running the newsletter are great people, but there’s no edge, no unique angle, no personality in the articles. In short, there just isn’t anything there worth reading any more. With each issue, I kept hoping...