Christopher Saunders

Web portal Yahoo! plans to begin charging fees for advanced features of its personal ads area, a spokesman for the firm said on Friday. While the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has been offering free personal ads through its Yahoo! Personals service for years, that policy will change starting on Wednesday, when the site begins requiring users […]

An awareness campaign for IBM’s new UNIX server, codenamed “Regatta,” has been scrapped in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks. The campaign, which debuted in the middle of last month, featured a variety of animated rich media banners and skyscraper ads, depicting a spy’s attempts to steal the secrets behind Regatta’s advanced multi-processing. In […]

Italy-based direct marketer and advertising firm SEAT Pagine Gialle is making a second North American acquisition, purchasing a 40 percent stake and setting the stage for possible future ownership of database marketer ICOM Information & Communications. Privately-held, Toronto-based ICOM provides tools for database marketing programs, and chiefly serves consumer packaged goods firms. Much of the […]

Online travel play Travelocity.com aims to expand to Europe and boost revenues through a joint venture with direct marketing and retailing giant Otto. Through the agreement, Fort Worth, Texas-based Travelocity.com will consolidate its UK and German sites into what the companies say will be a new, independent online travel company. Otto, best known in the […]

For the second time in a week, America Online is renegotiating a sales and marketing contract with a partner, this time paring down its relationship with Reston, Va.-based Talk America. Talk America, which provides local and long distance telephone services, will now stagger its payments to America Online, a unit of multi-media conglomerate AOL Time […]

Now operating under the rubric of “marketing software provider” following its high-profile exit from the media business, online marketer Engage is looking to right itself through a new flagship offering. The new product suite — officially dubbed the “Content Management Solution for Multichannel Marketing” — is the core of the firm’s new focus on delivering […]

In a move long expected by followers of the interactive agency space’s troubles, holding company Seneca Investments proposed Tuesday evening to acquire a majority stake in San Francisco-based i-shop Organic. Seneca, which already owns a 22.2 percent stake in Organic, is offering $0.33 per share — a penny premium over the average closing price of […]

Start-up ADexact will gain funds to help fuel the testing and eventual rollout of its interactive television advertising product, thanks to a $5.5 million round of financing led by Toronto-based RBC Capital Partners. Waterloo, Ontario-based ADexact makes targeting software for cable, satellite and broadcast operators to target ads — which could boost operators’ revenue per […]

Business-to-business marketplace provider PurchasePro will cease payments to AOL Time Warner’s America Online unit, through a restructured agreement between the two firms announced Monday. The two companies have had a promotional and technology deal since last March, when AOL agreed to use PurchasePro’s B2B exchange platform in its Netscape Netbusiness Marketplace. In return, PurchasePro would […]

Growth in Web usage by African Americans outpaced the average rate of growth during the past year, which could make the group more attractive to online advertisers, according to new figures from Nielsen//NetRatings. Based on a recent study by the firm — a joint venture of NetRatings and VNU’s ACNielsen and Nielsen Media Research — […]

While interactive television and iTV advertising remain niche markets at best, OpenTV is aiming to beef up the fledgling industry with a suite of new advertising-supported services. Specifically, Mountain View, Calif.-based OpenTV, one of the largest global players making software for network operators to deliver iTV programming and ads, will now offer Short Message Service […]

Just days after major news organizations pulled advertising from their Web sites to counter booming traffic, they’re again rethinking ad policy as clients express concern over being associated with negative news reports. A group of sites offering news about Tuesday’s disasters and the aftermath confirmed that advertisers had asked them to remove their ads or […]