Forming alliances is back. Announced just yesterday is a partnership between Yahoo and a consortium of
176 daily newspapers nationwide, possibly one of the biggest alliances in herstory. (Yes, I refer to the Internet as a she, like a boat or a car:
“She’s runnin’ like a dream today, baby!")

It’ll start with employment ads posted on HotJobs and
different kinds of technology sharing, but we’re guessing it’ll soon spread (like wildfire? or
peanut butter?) to an even hotter area – content. With big names like The San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Denver Post included in the deal, and
a combined monthly online readership of 58 million, we imagine that tagging and
optimizing the newspaper’s content for searching and indexing on Yahoo cannot
be far behind, possibly spurring on a much-needed comeback for both parties.

After all, they’ve both been taking quite a beating lately and are looking to scrape their way back up the ladder. The
newspapers want a piece of the pie (online ad revenue) and Yahoo
wants, well, to kick Google’s ass. All good reasons for them to kiss and make
up and get this alliance working for them, i.e.make everybody filthy rich.

And maybe then they’ll get Brad Garlinghouse voted off the island.

Six years ago, something amazing happened.

The U.S. military did something nice for the American people.

On that fateful day in May 2000, as CNN reported, they stopped scrambling the signal from their global positioning system – the equivalent of getting the 5th grade bully to stop spitting on other kids’ boloney sandwiches. This then gave private citizens and companies the capability of pinpointing their exact location with a much higher level of accuracy.

Lost men everywhere would rejoice at the possibility of never again having to ask for directions.
Marketers everywhere started seeing dollar signs.

Kyle Shannon of Agency.com even went so far as to call it "a marketer’s wet dream," but many admitted that it may be more of a pipe dream than
reality, with GPS technology still being in the beginning phases.

Flash back to the present: this story in Advertising Age says that GPS sales are going to triple in the U.S. this year, reaching an estimated $3.4 billion. Analyst group Berg Insight foresees a total of 12 billion handset-based personal navigation devices being shipped in the U.S. and Europe by 2009.

Companies like Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins have already made arrangements to have little popups appear on GPS screens whenever the owner nears one of their stores (craving a Bavarian Creme? it’s only 20 feet away!) to the annoyance of the consumer, perhaps, but to the delight of the advertiser.

Hey Kyle – are you sticky yet?

I swear, I didn’t mean
to infect your computer with nasty spyware. I didn’t know.

But you’d think, with a budget of $20 million per month
at their disposal, the Vonage big shots up in lovely Holmdel, New Jersey could afford a few extra
inspections to make sure that their advertising intermediaries actually
enforce their supposed anti-spyware policies.

Ben Edelman keeps an eye out for these big brands whose subcontractors are some of the
absolute worst names in the spyware industry. Direct Revenue, 1800solutions,
you name it, they’ve used it. Last month they even won an “Effie” award from the New York American Marketing Association for the effectiveness of their recent ad campaign.

Hey, you know what else
was effective? Secretly funding guerilla militants to undermine Communist
governments in Latin America and Southeast
Asia.

But really, we didn’t mean
it. We didn’t know.

In an effort to “loosen up,” G.E. and Pepsi-Cola North
America and their creative and media agencies – BBDO Worldwide and OMD
respectively – have taken the leap into offbeat commercials that supposedly
will reach out to their markets “in a way that has not been done before,”
reports Stuart Elliott in The New York Times.

This falls in line with the recent American Advertising
Federation’s study and Mediapost’s article which
predicts that 20% more of TV advertising budgets will shift to online
video by 2010. Pepsi even plans to feature clips created by consumers from sites
like YouTube, which makes me wonder if they’ll find the home video of my high
school boyfriend bonging a Mountain Dew at a house party.

ON the other hand, if you believe that BBDO and OMD are doing interactive things "in a way that has never been done before,"  we have some excellent frozen organic sensimillian chewing gum for you to chew.  Come on Stuart, you can do better than that.

Bidding wars over young talent who have some digital
marketing expertise is raging out of control, says Amy Hoover of Travel Zoo,
with competition for some positions driving annual salaries up steeply from
2005. The Wall Street Journal calls it “revenge of the nerds”, where digital
talent is finally getting the recognition it deserves. And it’s kind of nice to
be wanted.

But McCann and Ogilvy can’t hire everybody  — and even if they try to, the best, smartest entrepreneurial talent will go to smaller shops that stress innovation and dare we say it "integrated" experience.  I mean even at $70 k a year, do you seriously  want to be some 23 year old’s trafficking bitch?

So aside from the paycheck and better swag, the real stars are going to come from the innovators, not the bulk suppliers.

But he’d better get his tookus down the chimney in four
seconds or less, or he don’t get any cookies.

Emarketer projections for the 2006 online
holiday shopping season are promising, with Jupiter Research predicting a
record 114 million users and an increase of 18% to $32 billion in sales, but
with a typically American twist: if the page takes more than 4 seconds to load,
impatient online shoppers will take their business elsewhere.

But as Seana Mulcahy points out, web traffic on commercial sites in these months increases so much
that there will be inevitable delays. Like trying to race up an escalator at
Macy’s the day after Thanksgiving: watch out, Grandma. I guess we’ll all have to
wait our turn to sit on Santa’s lap.

As if our obsession with celebrity gossip and couture fashion
wasn’t bad enough, now there is a new website to feed the addiction. This
article in The New York Times directs us to Like.com, which serves as a
matchmaker between the average Jane and all the cute accessories that catch her eye on Fifth Avenue – or in the latest issue of People.

From Mischa to Halle, Diddy to Brad, shoppers can pinpoint key accessories and be ‘inspired’ to buy
their “Likeness” from multitudes of online retailers. It’s a win-win situation:
the merchants get the business, Like.com gets the commission, and little
Jessica gets the Ugg wristlet handbag Fergie was sporting at the Pea Pod
concert benefit.

Whatever happened to the days when “poseur” was an insult?