Guidewire Launches Corporate Blogging Survey

Guidewire Group, producer of the BlogOn conference has partnered with content management company iUpload to launch a survey querying corporations on the current state of blogging at the enterprise level and the blogging strategies behind current blog-related initiatives.

BuzzMetrics Acquired by Trendum

Online word of mouth research firm BuzzMetrics,has been acquired by Trendum, an Internet search and linguistic analysis technology company. The tow companies hope to create global standards to measure and analyze consumer buzz.

The company will do business as BuzzMetrics and have the strategic backing of VNU, owner of ACNielsen and Nielsen Media Research. VNU is a minority shareholder in the new company. BuzzMetrics hopes the deal will build on Trendum's technology, and expand the operation through VNU's global sales, marketing and research capabilities.

IGA Gaming 101 Series Offers Industry In-Game Advertising Education

To help marketers and agencies understand and take advantage of gaming as a medium, has launched a series of Gaming 101 sessions. IGA hopes to educate the marketplace about the current and future videogaming landscape, the changing demographics of gamers, how the hardware platforms differ from each other, and how to run in-game advertising campaigns that get results.

Advertising agencies that have held or are scheduled to hold IGA Partners Gaming 101 sessions include Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, SS+K, Manning Gottlieb OMD, Avenue A | Razorfish.

A typical IGA Gaming 101 session provides an overview of the gaming space and gaming ad formats such as advergaming, product placement/plot-integration, dynamic in-game advertising, and casual gaming. Along with any form of consultant comes buzzwords and IGA's "Metrification," a proprietary in-game advertising quantitative and qualitative measurement and analysis framework.

Ruskin Says Channel One, Schools Promote Smoking

According to a new report (PDF) from Gary Ruskin's Commercial Alert "sixty percent of movies advertised on the in-school TV program Channel One portray smoking." Ruskin claims since January 1, 2000 40 out of 67 movie ads aired on Channel One portrayed smoking. Ruskin's group, of course, doesn't like this and claims the portrayal of smoking in movies causes 390,000 young people take up smoking each year.

Ad Age Reporter to Get Stuck In Airports

Likening airport terminals to marketing microcosms, Ad Age has paid Greg Lindsay to spend three weeks traveling the globe to report on the inner workings of airport terminals. Called "Airworld," the project aims to examine airport's "vast media and retail ecosystem" and dig into the "largest coherent stand-alone marketing venues on earth." It's not exactly a glamorous assignment but it just might lend a bit more insight into the inner commerce of airports than the Tom Hanks movie Terminal.

Agency Intern Searches For Meaning of Ritual

Whether a veiled agency promotion or just two kooks on bikes, 86 the Onions design intern and UCLA student Steve Ounanian and bike messenger Chris Jahn left Los Angeles on bikes September 5 and north on a 100 mile-per-day, 14 day ride to Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. The purpose of the pair's trip, in a nod to the morning coffee quest, is to examine people's daily rituals - their's and the rituals of others - and understand why routine is so important. The two are documenting the trip with a blog and video clips.

Ounanian says, "The hypothesis is, ritual equals comfort, but it also equals, ironically, both freedom and confinement. There is something about the repetitive task of riding my bike, the machine aspect of it that is alluring. When everything is uncertain, stressful, or even wonderful—you can have control over it by just executing your daily ritual." Ounanian and Jahn are stopping in 14 cities on the way and interviewing people about their daily rituals hoping to understand it's core. Somehow, this is all related to marketing. Or research. Or agency promotion. Or weight loss. Or. Or. Or not.

Marketers Adopt Ad-ID Ad Tracking System

Ad industry trade groups, The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), today, announced Ad-ID, a universal ad coding standard, has been adopted by more than 300 of the nation's top marketers. In addition, a total of 875 companies have registered in Ad-ID, and over 14,000 individual codes have been created for various forms of advertising.

Ad-ID provides the foundation for digital trafficking and tracking as well as digital connectivity. It is the equivalent of the retail community's "UPC code." By assigning a unique system-generated identification code to all advertising assets, television, online, print and radio, Ad-ID can improve the accuracy and efficiency of advertising processes from delivery through billing, and is said to,ultimately, contribute to tracking and measuring advertising effectiveness across campaigns.

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Study Says Audience Measurement Horrible

The Advertising Research Foundation has released a study which finds current media consumption measurement methodologies to be woefully outdated and inaccurate.

Glamorous, High Cost TV Commercial Production to End

Sullivan Higdon & Sink VP Creative Director and one half of the American Copywriter podcast team John January has weighed in on the recent Project Wannamaker study by The PreTesting Company which found creative effectiveness burns out after two to three weeks on the air.

In response to a blog post by Business Week's David Kiley which, in part, predicted a trend towards increasing offshore commercial production, January wrote, "Outsourcing production to India? Come on, kids. We can figure this out. Can't we? All it takes is open minds. Open-minded creatives, open-minded producers, open-minded production partners. So simple in pixels. So not simple in real life. But we'd better get our collective heads around this."

Kiley also mentions one agency is exploring how MTV produces so many high quality promotions and videos at low cost and how media shops, with their number crunching efficiencies are about to take on the bloated world of advertising production. Forget weblogs. That shift, if it sees light of day, is something to seriously ponder.

Study Measures Ad Viewership, Campaign Duration Too Long

Perhaps forcing Nielsen to more quickly move its plans to measure commercial rather than programming, The PreTesting Company has is currently conducting a 2,500 Omaha home test of its MediaCheck Project Wannamaker (nice reference to the 50/50 statement), which measures ad viewership rather than program viewership, found most people tire of a campaign's commercials after just two weeks indicating overexposure and poor creative hurt TV campaigns the most. The study also found that DVR-equipped homes did not skip commercials any more than non-DVR (by changing channel, etc.) homes.

The company has plans to roll out a national, 50,000 home study and is is talks with cable operators to incorporate the measurement technology in set top boxes. Hello? Nielsen? Hello?