Brian Morrissey

PepsiCo and Yahoo! have linked up for the beverage giant’s summer promotional push that will give one consumer the chance to win a billion dollars. Purchase, N.Y.-based Pepsi is expected to spend up to $100 million on the summer-long promotion. Yahoo! will host and maintain the sweepstakes site that registers users to be one of […]

America Online launched a two-month promotion to hype the benefits of AOL Broadband, on which the company has pinned its hopes of a turnaround. “Look, Listen & Play” will give AOL users a taste of the summer’s upcoming musical and movie releases, as AOL Time Warner’s struggling ISP unit tries to leverage the strength of […]

Paid search provider FindWhat.com reported solid first-quarter results Wednesday, raising its full-year guidance to a $10 million profit this year. FindWhat said it anticipated losing its partnership with Applied Semantics, now owned by Google, but that it would make up for this loss by wringing more revenue out of its Terra Lycos deal. For the […]

AOL’s president of interactive marketing, Robert Sherman, informed the company of his retirement on Monday. Sherman had spent a year heading up the AOL Time Warner ISP unit’s struggling ad sales division, attempting to revamp the organization to stem the huge declines in ad revenue. To some degree, his efforts have been a success. After […]

Anti-spam company Habeas, which hopes to fight spam through copyright and trademark law, announced a settlement in its month-old suit against affiliate network Intermark Media, after the company fingered a customer Habeas accuses of infringing on its trademark. Habeas dropped its claims against Syosset, N.Y.-based InterMark Media and its subsidiary Avalend, which Habeas had accused […]

With AOL executives at his side, Virginia Governor Mark Warner signed into law the toughest anti-spam bill in the nation Tuesday, making fraudulent spam a felony in the state. Virginia is just one of 26 states that have passed anti-spam laws, but the signing was heralded by the governor and AOL executives as an important […]

Rich media technology provider Eyeblaster announced Tuesday the availability of a “polite” downloading rich media banner ad unit the company said would marry the dynamism of rich media with the ubiquity of banner ads — without slowing down users. The new rich media option is 100k, about five times the file size of a static […]

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced on Tuesday the finalization of its suite of standard ad units, called the Universal Ad Package (UAP). The package, proposed last December by the IAB, was endorsed by 23 members, including heavyweights like New York Times Digital, CBS MarketWatch, MSN and Yahoo!. The members agreed to implement the four […]

ComScore Networks announced Monday the creation of qSearch, a measurement service for the search industry. Marketers and agencies will get a better handle on search traffic patterns and the best strategy for their keyword advertising programs with qSearch, comScore said. The service will use comScore’s measurement panel of 1.5 million Internet users to cull traffic […]

Just a month after its launch, Web-based e-mail service Mailblocks launched a three-month online ad blitz on Monday, aiming to persuade e-mail users fed up by a deluge of spam to try an alternative to Hotmail and Yahoo!. The Mailblocks campaign, created by San Francisco-based BigMouth, will run across a variety of ad networks, including […]

Rich media company Unicast on Monday unveiled the full-screen, 15-second Superstitial, a unit the company believes can draw traditional advertisers to the Web by giving them the chance to mimic their TV ads. The full-screen Superstitial unit is a standard unit: 900 x 680 pixels and 300k. It plays, with video and sound, as users […]

With the much-anticipated Federal Trade Commission (FTC) spam conference days away, New York Senator Charles Schumer joined the fray Monday with a proposal that would set up a national “do-not-spam” registry under the FTC’s auspices. Schumer’s proposed anti-spam legislation would require e-mail marketers to check the list before sending mass e-mails. To back up the […]