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ZAAZ is a premier interactive agency that provides performance-driven design services to top brands and Fortune 1,000 companies including Microsoft, Converse, E*Trade, Qwest, Alcoa, Blockbuster, Expedia, Reuters, T-Mobile, National Geographic and others. ZAAZ services include web strategy, design, development, user experience, web analysis and optimization. Years ago, ZAAZ recognized a gap in the interactive marketplace. While many enterprise organizations had analytics tools, very few were getting maximum value from them. At the same time, web initiatives scoring big on creativity alone often lacked any scientific proof of their effectiveness. By providing both sides of this equation (award-winning design + comprehensive analysis), ZAAZ is able to provide creative solutions that work -- and the proof to back it up. Founded in 1998, ZAAZ is privately held and has offices in Seattle and Portland. For more information

“I talk to young folks in [Wunderman's] training program, and all they want to talk about is what we're going to do with digital and the Internet,” Morel complains.

You see the articles, the names, a photo. Sometimes you smell a sample of perfume. Each element of communication goes quickly to the next page. Try to do that on a laptop. You can't replicate cursory reading and the surprise that you have reading a magazine or reading something in the mail.”

The site StudioCom proposed had two main components. The first, called the Launching Pad, is the result of a Coke partnership with AOL Music and features eight emerging recording artists each month. CokeMusic.com users can read these musicians' bios, listen to their music and watch videos

When a user plays a mix at a virtual club, other CokeMusic.com denizens vote on the mix, and the DJ wins "decibels" based on his or her number of "thumbs-up." Decibels are the currency of Coke Studios, and can be exchanged for furniture items. These in turn can be used to enhance users' private rooms, virtual spaces where groups of avatars listen to music and engage in impromptu games. It all adds to the sense of possibility and play users perceive within the site, which is what keeps 'em coming back.

OgilvyInteractive is a shop that is just as comfortable setting up an electronic billboard in Times Square to do real-time wireless voting for Dove as it is discussing the finer points of Linux with the hardcore IBM audience

OgilvyInteractive, the interactive arm of customer relationship management unit OgilvyOne, has long been one of the biggest agencies on IQ's list of the Top 50 Interactive Agencies. But this year its growth outpaced the rest.

is a form of marketing that evolved from direct response marketing in the 1960s and emerged in the 1980s, in which emphasis is placed on building longer term relationships with customers rather than on individual transactions. It involves understanding the customer's needs as they go through their life cycles. It emphasizes providing a range of products or services to existing customers as they need them.

The practice of relationship marketing has been greatly facilitated by several generations of customer relationship management software that allow tracking and analysing of each customer's preferences, activities, tastes, likes, dislikes, and complaints. This is a powerful tool in any company's marketing strategy. For example, an automobile manufacturer maintaining a database of when and how repeat customers buy their products, the options they choose, the way they finance the purchase etc., is in a powerful position to custom target sales material. In return, the customer benefits from the company tracking service schedules and communicating directly on issues like product recalls

Mediadge:cia has merged online and offline lead generation media planning and buying divisions into a single new entity called MEC Interaction.

This new unit encompasses the former Wunderman Media direct response division, Digital Edge media planning and buying division and the Outrider search engine marketing group.

NEW YORK Media Market Solutions, a media shop managed by WPP's GroupM, is being merged with Maxus, the smallest of GroupM's four agency networks, the company confirmed today.

The move is the latest step in a long-term plan to expand Maxus, which opened its doors in the U.S. in 2005. Before the merger with MMS, U.S billings for Maxus were estimated at $500 million-plus

Wunderman and VML (WPP sister agencies) have entered into a strategic partnership

This partnership will dramatically enhance the depth and breadth of both companies’ interactive/digital service offering in North America.

Searches conducted on AOL were most likely to lead to online consumer purchases in January, according to a new WebSideStory index

AOL generated the best rate (6.17 percent), followed by MSN (6.03 percent), Yahoo (4.07 percent) and Google (3.83 percent), according to the index.

Peter Levinsohn, the new head of News Corp’s digital division, has every reason to be in a good mood, having just watched a presentation in which online social networking was heralded as the advertising medium of the future.

social networking’s ability to create a viral “momentum effect” for brands. It suggested social networking was more effective for advertisers than television as it creates more engagement between individual brands and consumers.

Most firms use or plan to use inbound customer interactions as an opportunity to cross-sell and upsell their products and services. Inbound channels are attractive to marketers — there's no clutter to cut through.

To avoid these potential pitfalls, firms should evaluate interaction management software which applies business rules and real-time analytics to a customer profile made up of historical and contextual data.

Omniture's acquisition of Touch Clarity is the first substantial acquisition by a Web analytics vendor to marry the analytics platform with marketing execution. We expect to see more acquisitions of this nature as Web analytics vendors and vendors in other categories, like email marketing, strive to build a more comprehensive online marketing suite.

This week Omniture announced its intention to acquire Touch Clarity, a UK-based Web interaction optimization provider, in a $51.5 million deal.(see endnote 1) The acquisition is the latest in a series of steps by Omniture to transform itself from a Web analytics provider to a data-driven online marketing execution suite.(see endnote 2) Why is this important to interactive marketers? Marketers want an integrated suite to manage their programs, capture data, track responses, and measure performance.(see endnote 3) Touch Clarity gives Omniture:

we were surprised to find that contact optimization technology ranked second on the list of enterprise technologies that marketers said their firm is planning to implement. Even more shocking was our finding that consumer products firms — including consumer goods, automotive, and pharmaceuticals — are significantly more aggressive in their plans than other industries. Our key takeaway: Marketers are confused by what contact optimization technology is and what it can deliver.

A high-volume direct marketing operation

consumers personalize them with ringtones, wallpapers, and friends' contact information

The audience for mobile marketing is growing. Marketers have no difficulty accessing a young audience via mobile — three out of four users between 12 and 21 use text messaging, and nearly half use picture messaging or download ringtones.

Viewing Web sites on cellphones isn't a mass pastime in the U.S. quite yet. Screens are tiny, download speeds are often slow and fees can pile up. Yet a sliver of people -- about 15% of U.S. cellphone users, according to research firm M:Metrics Inc. -- do surf online via their phones, checking out entertainment, news and other sites.

But the banner—the lowly, punch-the-monkey, lower-my-bills piece of animated junk that delivers abysmal click-through rates—is the modern equivalent of direct mail, where a 1% response is considered a massive success

Display or banner advertising basically just contributes to clutter and place emphasis on inflated page view numbers that no one believes because no one can agree on how to audit the numbers. That makes no one happy—not the poor junior ad designers who have to shoehorn genius into a slot 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall; not the traffickers who have to pore through Comscore to find the right demographic to serve them to; and not the client who knows return on investment is going to be a joke; and not the site that hosts the suckers and has to watch its gorgeous site design get nuked by the online equivalent of NASCAR after too many beers.

Ad servers—the tools that place ads on a page—are neither interesting nor fun to play with. Those who do use them usually hate them and trade tales of their quirks and bad behaviors like grizzled war veterans. Which explains why ad ops is the most thankless job in the interactive world,

So now that Google has it, what chance do DoubleClick's competitors have? I like Atlas, Acquantive's (AQNT) ad server. It is allegedly more precise than DoubleClick and, when it first came on the scene in the late '90s, tortured us at Forbes.com in terms of its precision demands. Quigo is a great company, out of Ziff-Davis, with a very aggressive attitude about niche paid search. As The New York Times noted on Apr. 17, all the ad server alternatives got a nice share-price boost thanks to Google putting a value and some attention on their market

I have an inkling Adobe's new Apollo technology, introduced last month, will be one of these slow bloomers. On the surface, Apollo is a simple way for software developers to create Web software that shares data with your desktop. Apple's iTunes does this already (you can merge songs downloaded from the Web with the ones stored on your computer). So does Google's photo service, Picassa.

If developers take to Apollo in droves, we're in for a creative explosion. For starters, we'll see the birth of a new breed of Web-ified applications. These will appear as an icon on your desktop and store data on your hard drive, like Microsoft's Word. Yet when launched, they'll have Web-like dynamism--moving, constantly updated videos, images and information.

Of more than 2,000 respondents to an email survey, almost 40% expressed interested in mobile TV.

Mobile TV, which comScore defines as "television watched via a mobile phone device," is currently most popular with young men. About two-thirds of subscribers are male, and almost half are under the age of 35