IAR Bits and Bytes

Digital Pulp Lands Plow & Hearth Work

New York-based online agency Digital Pulp added two new recent wins to its client roster.

Madison, Va.-based home and garden retailer Plow & Hearth tapped the firm to handle the design and relaunch of its Web site. Plow & Hearth is a wholly owned subsidiary of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, with which Digital Pulp has worked since 1999.

Plow & Hearth launched its first Web site with secure ordering and commerce capabilities in 1998. When the site relaunches in September, it will be its first redesign.

Earlier this month, SmartMoney.com named Digital Pulp its lead creative agency. Digital Pulp won the account following an informal review involving undisclosed New York agencies. New York’s DiMassimo Brand Advertising previously held creative duties.

The campaign for SmartMoney.com will be a national business-trade campaign in late spring.

Other clients of the firm include c2it by Citibank, and Universal Music Group’s Bluematter.com.

Real Media Serves One Billion Impressions on weather.com

Some good came of the recent “Storm-of-the-Century-That-Wasn’t.” Ad network Real Media broke a record for ad delivery on one of the sites it represents, during the week ending March 5.

The New York-based company’s Open AdStream ad serving software delivered more than one billion impressions on weather.com in that time — during which, as readers might recall, severe storms were predicted for much of the north eastern seaboard, though little materialized beyond rain showers in most places.

Weather.com, the Web site of The Weather Channel, said it had chosen Real Media’s ad solution because of its rapid scalability — useful, it said, in times when emergency weather conditions drive increased traffic to the site. Until last year, the company had used DoubleClick as its ad server.

Other Real Media affiliates include Bloomberg, New York Times Digital and MP3.com.

Search Engine Optimization Service offers Guarantee

Strategic Computer Consulting says it’s offering a money-back guarantee if its Internet Search Engine Positioning service fails to put a client’s site in a top-20 position on a major Web search engine.

The search engines included in the guarantee include Yahoo, Lycos, WebCrawler, Alta Vista, Northern Light, AOL, MSN, and Google.

Needless to say, search engines typically are not thrilled with firms like SCC and 24/7 Media’s Website Results, both of which promise higher positioning in search engine’s results. Google, for instance, has said that goes to significant lengths to thwart the so-called search engine optimizers.

Nevertheless, SCC said that if it can’t get a client top-20 positioning is not achieved, the client does not pay. The firm said it uses 20 undisclosed methodologies to boost its clients’ positioning.