In contrast to recent Nielsen figures that showed flat spending for display last year, Kantar Media—fka “TNS Media” before being acquired by WPP Group and folded into its KMR Group—says that the segment actually gained a healthy 7.3 percent versus 2008. Kantar says that increased activity by the telecom, factory…

Hitwise runs the numbers and notes that for the first time ever last week Facebook passed Google (NSDQ: GOOG) to become the most visited website in the U.S. It’s not as though Google has stopped growing; it’s just that Facebook is growing at a much faster clip. The caveats: It’s…

The latest report on online news economics from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is one of those studies that will bolster just about any view people have about paying for news online. Want to show that news consumers are unwilling to pay?  Results from a national phone survey conducted…

Nielsen’s latest bid to stay ahead of the audience measurement competition involves striking an alliance with behavioral targeter eXelate. The companies tell the WSJ that eXelate has agreed to provide Nielsen with its data covering 150 million internet users. That information will be combined with Nielsen’s database, which covers 115…

Marketers and agency execs began gathering for the 4A’s Transformation 2010 conference in San Francisco to go over the current challenges to the traditional way of doing business. On day two, topics included the use of consumer data and who’s got control of it, the growth of consumer control over…

People love to debate the merits of free vs. paid content. But overlooked in all this is the cost of access to that content—that’s where the action is. We’re paying more than we ever have to receive our movies, news and music, according to Forrester analyst James McQuivey. Here’s his…

Yes Movielink and Cinemanow sucked for a long time, and iTunes never became a huge movie seller. That was 2-3 years ago. So what happened since, as online streaming has taken off? Turns out, not much on the uptick, only downside, in terms of revenues. According to new data coming…

The term “flat is the new ‘up’” was heard a lot last year with regard to ad spending. Now that Nielsen says display ad spending ended 2009 with a 1 percent gain, perhaps in 2010 “up” will retain its actual meaning. While a number of categories show signs of arresting…

It’s half-way through the Vancouver Olympics and NBC Universal’s research head Alan Wurtzel already has some findings to share about the viewing results so far. Anticipating the ire of bloggers who have complained that NBCU has been holding back too much live coverage of the games from online, Wurtzel made…

For the past several months, analysts have been predicting the local online advertising is likely to remain hot. As new numbers from BIA/Kelsey show, local online media is gaining not so much because it can tap smaller marketers that have tended to be overlooked by major media, it’s because traditional…

CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) Chief Research Officer Dave Poltrack took dead aim at a Forrester Research survey that said marketers consider TV ads less and less effective. AdAge was there to capture Poltrack’s fit of pique. He was particularly set off by advertisers’ claim that only 41 percent of their…

AOL (NYSE: AOL) has signed up for a three-year, $200,000 “consortium sponsorship” of the MIT Media Lab. After reorganizing its advertising and content units over the past few months, AOL is now moving to reform its technology side. Late last month, after denying that CTO Ted Cahall was leaving AOL,…

Hark, the herald angels sing! Total UK ad spend will rise this autumn, after nine consecutive quarters of annual decline, according to an Advertising Association and WARC forecast. The rise is modest - Q3 2010 is predicted to be 2.8 percent up from the year before. But it’s heartening after…

Several broadcast companies that reported earnings in the past few weeks have pointed out that TV station revenues were down due to the lack of political ad spending in 2009. Since 2010 is a banner year for major Congressional races, local media researcher Borrell Associates expects that TV broadcasters will…

The drive to increase membership for the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement , the research initiative formed by major TV networks, agencies and advertisers, is bearing fruit as the organization has added a number of high-profile companies. At its first meeting of 2010, CIMM also provided more details on the…

ClearSaleing, a company that claims to specialize in something called “attribution management”—in something close to plain English, “ROI tracking”—has closed a $3.75 million third round. Included in the round was a $1.7 million investment from NCT Ventures Fund I. The rest of the funding was made up of a combination…

Some data that is certain to be used to back up assertions that news aggregators—like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News—are competing with newspaper sites as much as they are driving traffic to them. A survey of nearly 3,000 U.S. news consumers by research firm Outsell shows that 44 percent of Google…

Good news for the big search companies with earnings season just ahead. Search engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier has upped its estimates for search ad spending this year. The company now expects spending to increase between 15 and 20 percent, up from its earlier estimates of 10 to 15 percent…

The real estate market is expected to remain weak for at least another three years, but the category’s ad spending is expected to see a small recovery this year. However, as report from local ad analyst Borrell Associates shows, any uptick in spending will be unevenly spread across specific kinds…