Recently in Advertising Category

Jack Links Beef Jerky has a wonderful series of commercials out right now called Messin' With Sasquatch. My personal favorite is the Pickup Truck spot. But go check out the Official Messin With Sasquatch site to see them all! 

Sasquatch even has a MySpace page, which he updates regularly, unlike everyone else!. His life is absolutely riveting, so of course I added him to my friends list.  I love being able to get all Web 2.0 with Big Foot!

Last week, the New York Times Online boldly abandoned it's subsciption model, and is now offering all of the site content without the need to login. This opened up the site's archives, and all other columnist based content to the entire web viewing audience.  Analysts are now closely watching the actions of Rupert Murdoch to determine if the Wall Street Journal will follow in the Times footsteps once the Journal is officially under his control.

Signs point to Yes!

I guess the newspaper organizations have finally woken up and smelled the coffee Google and AOL have been brewing for the past decade.  Free the content, and the advertisers will take care of the rest.

San Jose startup, PuddingMedia, has come up with a new way to make money from phone calls connected via the Internet: having software listen to the calls, then displaying ads on the callers' computer screens based on what's being talked about. The company announced today that their free internet calling service, ThePudding.com, will launch on Monday October 1, 2007.  But beware, someone will be listening to your calls.

ThePudding.com will provide 100% free calling to any phone number in North America without the need to download software to your computer.  You simply dial in over ThePudding.com's website, and talk over the pudding VOIP network.  Voice recognition software, VoiceSense (TM),  hosted on PuddingMedia servers will translate your conversation, and content will be served to you on ThePudding.com that is relevant to the conversation you are having with the person on the other end of the line.

Talking about movies? You might see local movie listings and times served to you on ThePudding.com. Discussing what food you need to bring to an upcoming office party, and you're served recipes or ad from local take out restaurants.

The company's privacy policy claims that they do not collect, record, or store any conversations, and that they  "implement reasonable and appropriate security safeguards" to secure your data. Well, that's comforting. I will be interested to see how this product plays out.  Sounds a lot like snooping to me. (Oh, and by the way, the Privacy Policy and FAQ are MS Word documents that you have to download to read. Argh.)

Read More will take you to the Press Release from PuddingMedia.