Email is for fogies and old farts according to research conducted by the Pew Trust. 

"Internet users from 12 to 17 years old say e-mail is best
for talking to parents or institutions, but they are more
likely to fire up IM when talking with each other."

Article here.

Brian Steinberg of the Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that IPG is forming a "Marketing Accountability Partnership" unit to help advertisers track the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. This will be interesting to watch as to how much of this quantitative analysis will be technology-based, and to what level of granularity?

Unilever’s online agency has created a series of animated soap opera "webisodes" to promote "I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter" sprays; you can watch them here. (IPG’s McCann Erickson handles the offline campaign for Unilever, but
these online "webisodes" were created by Byte Interactive.)

Quoted in this New York Times article Javier Martin, Unilever Brand Manager, explained:

"Classical advertising is not as effective and efficient as it has been
in the past… so we’re looking for more
innovative ways to reach our consumers."

These "webisodes" must be confirmation of what was put forth in this March 2005 article from Poynteronline, where Harry Dekker noted that Unilever was going to triple their online ad spend – from 5% to 15% of their budget.

Avenue A – the media powerhouse division of aQuantive – lost the MSN business to Universal McCann, according to this Ad Week article. aQuantive was quick to state that this was a consolidation effort – and not a reflection on the quality of their media division; AQNT also made it clear that MSN accounted for less than 1% of their first half 2005 revenue. But we’re curious – what % of Avenue A’s revenue did MSN represent?

FYI: There is a new website for agency media folks – MediaPlannerBuyer. MPB’s mission is "[to keep] media people up to date on news that has real effects on their jobs."

Umbria is upgrading its "Buzz Report" analytics service, according to this MediaPost article. The "Buzz Report" tracks conversations about brands across the blogging universe, and the upgrade will provide more specific demographic information about the bloggers writing about those brands.

Like the ever-elusive "Life Time Value" formula, supposedly P&G’s Tremor division, after four years of work, has cracked the code on measuring "word of mouth." Check out the article here. Wonder how online plays into the formula? Did P&G attend WOMMA’s (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) event in Chicago a few weeks ago?

Yahoo! and aQuantive aren’t the only companies that enjoyed Q2 success. In typical Google fashion, they just keep crushing their numbers. (Mediapost.)

Pointroll’s sequential rich media ad capability is spotlighted in this Ad Week article. Pretty intuitive – sequential ads show a viewer a progression of messages based on their prior behavior.

According to this eMarketer report, consumers are confused about exactly what cookies do – and whether they are a good or a bad thing. The result is that increasingly, consumers are beginning to delete their cookies – just to be safe. This might become a major problem for marketers.

Essentially, there are two conflicting forces that are creating the current cookie issues:

"First,
consumers are growing increasingly alarmed about online security.
Second, marketers are demanding more detailed ad measurement and
delivery, comprehensive user tracking through various stages of
Internet encounters, and proof of the effectiveness of ad targeting
based on user behavior—all of which involve cookies."

This article from The Globe and Mail echoes the same problem.