Channel | Digital

(Promo) This month, the Coca-Cola Co. plans to launch a social community for teens via mobile phones for its Sprite brand.

Pet Food Direct Inc. has received an infusion of $10 million in investment capital from LLR Partners Inc., a private equity investment firm based in Philadelphia. The money has been designated to finance growth initiatives for the online direct marketer.

The latest online advertising projections from JupiterResearch predict total online advertising spending will grow to just shy of $20 billion by the end of this year and increase to $35.4 billion by 2012.

A ploy to promote Google's Checkout automated payment system has led auction Web site eBay to pull its Google search advertising, depriving Google of its largest single AdWords client.

The Federal Trade Commission is conducting a review of Microsoft's $6.1 billion proposed bid for interactive agency aQuantive, according to press reports. Yahoo's $680 million offer to acquire the 80% of ad exchange Right Media that it does not already own will also come under FTC review.

Search marketing will continue to attract growing ad budgets from now until 2011, but its share of total online ad spending will slowly decline during that time from 40% in 2006 to 32% in 2011 due to the rise of Internet video advertising, according to a report from research firm International Data Corp.

To share some ideas for driving user engagement through digital creative, I spoke to Olaf Czeschner, Chief Creative Officer, Frankfurt, Germany. Our international colleagues bring a refreshing perspective since their markets have different design sensibilities and different degrees of technology penetration.

Technology is the servant of your marketing goals, not their master. Instead of jumping on the next social media phenomenon, first ask yourself this: what do all these media channels allow me to do that I couldn't do before?

The publisher networks operated by the big search engines—and for that matter, most contextual networks owned by anyone—have gotten a reputation as somewhat murky environments where advertisers can’t be sure what sites are delivering their ads or how well those placements are performing. As a result, some marketers have shied away from advertising on Google’s…

How can you tell search marketing has gone main stream? Well, it might be the moonshot prices the engines have offered for recent acquisitions such as Doubleclick and aQuantive. Or you could note, as The Times Online did last month, that Google, a company that went public less than three years ago, now has greater…