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Grades for sale at Naples High

Do you remember school fund raise drives? Perhaps you recall being a child having to sell boxes of chocolate, or maybe you recently ran into a young fund raiser outside the supermarket with candy for his band or choir. Then again you might even have the halfway-depleted box your son or daughter couldn't sell last week. I remember being saved from fund raiser hell on more than one occasion, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one. In a twist on this common theme, a high school journalism class at Naples High School has been tasked to sell advertising in their school's yearbook and their grade depends on it.

According to NBC2, the students must sell $600 in ads to receive an A, $500 for a B, $400 for a C, $300 for a D, and students who are unable to sell at least $300 in advertising for the school yearbook will receive an F. While it's certainly true that advertising is an essential component for almost any news organization, it is typically not the role of journalists to solicit these dollars. In fact, there is usually a wall between the advertising staff and the news staff to prevent conflicts of interest when an advertiser ends up in the news.

Romney to Netroots: Make my next TV ad

Either Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is trying to redeem himself for previously knocking the CNN-YouTube debates' "demeaning" format (thanks to an animated snowman posing questions about global warming), or he's not so hostile to the user-generated sphere after all.

In any case, the former Massachusetts governor's campaign on Wednesday announced it is now soliciting help from the mashup-happy masses in crafting his new official television ad. Partnering with Yahoo's Jumpcut.com online video-editing service, a new contest implores savvy video splicers to put together a 27- or 57-second feature using multimedia furnished by his … Read more

Google nabs CNN ad deal from Yahoo

Google said Tuesday that it signed a multi-year advertising agreement with CNN.com, in a win over the news site's former partner, Yahoo.

As part of the agreement, Google will be the exclusive provider of contextually targeted text ads on CNN.com's pages (via Google's AdSense program). The deal does not include the placement of image or video ads, however.

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The deal is a blow to Yahoo, whose search-advertising group (formerly known as Overture) has been an ad partner of CNN.com for more than three years. In 2004, … Read more

Report: Facebook may be solving that little 'revenue' problem

Throughout Facebook's recent and meteoric rise, one of the detractors raised by skeptics has continually been the social networking site's failure to show concrete proof of a strong revenue model.

But that all might change very soon.

According to a report on the Wall Street Journal's Web site, the social network is "quietly" assembling a new advertising model that will take advantage of the copious personal information that its members post on their profiles. These new advertisements would not be in the form of traditional graphical advertisements but would rather pepper the "news feed&… Read more

New ads jar some YouTube fans

Fans of Google's YouTube are starting to react to overlay advertisements the company began testing on Wednesday. Some find them jarring, some in international quarters wish they could see them, and still others are wondering if they can make money off their own videos with these ads. While there's hardly a unanimous opinion, one thing is for certain: Google is finally looking to cash in on its $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition.

The ads appear at the bottom of a video shortly after the clip starts to play and disappear after 10 seconds. They resemble the TV-style ads … Read more

Bluetooth billboard beams free ringtone

Would you accept a free ringtone from a billboard? Westin hopes so. They've installed a Bluetooth-enabled billboard in the subway stop below Grand Central Station in New York City. The billboard beams a free ringtone to those passing by.

The interactive ad is part of a $30 million push for their "This is how it should feel" campaign. Instead of pictures of plush beds or in-room workstations, there are steps converted into waterfalls, image shifting ads with a boardroom meeting on one side and sky diving on the other and the entire insides of subway cars transformed … Read more

Canadian group opposes Google-DoubleClick deal

The latest group to chime in on Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of ad firm DoubleClick is the--get ready because this is a long one--Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa, to be referred to as the CIPPIC going forward.

The CIPPIC is asking Canadian regulators, the Competition Commissioner, to be exact, to review the Google-DoubleClick deal. Like others before it, the CIPPIC alleges that the merger would prevent or at least significantly lessen competition in the market for online targeted advertising because of Google's dominance in keyword search and DoubleClick's … Read more

Hilarious Axe ad campaign tells geeks to 'get a girlfriend'

Axe body spray is just about the nastiest stuff on the planet--trust me, guys, don't wear it, it's girl repellent and is really only good for covering up scents that might make the cops come a'knocking--but they did come out with a particularly clever ad campaign. It's not often that ads me laugh out loud for real, but these did.

A series of photographs show visual tableaux of young fellows who clearly have spent too much time doing somewhat pointless things (training frogs to jump, occupying all ten high-score spots on an arcade video game, building … Read more

Still more from Always On: Advertising and Services

Somebody's got to help all these Web 2.0 darlings make a few bucks. Here at the Always On Stanford Summit, several advertising and service companies pitched concepts to help companies make money, or save it through more efficient operations.

Spiceworks is a network monitoring product. It looks like Network Magic, in that it automatically detects what's on your network. Except it's built for business, not home. What's interesting about this IT product: It's free, supported by sponsors and advertisers. I have to try this.

Baynote is a service that monitors what users do on … Read more

Google's ad strategy dissected

Google invited a few journalists to the Googleplex on Tuesday to meet with Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management for the company's advertising programs. She didn't make any big announcements (much to the chagrin of fellow attendees), but she talked about the industry and reminded us that online advertising isn't going away anytime soon.

"The (core ad) business we have is a huge business, and it is still growing at a healthy rate," she said in response to a question about concerns that Google is a one-trick pony. "We expect to continue to … Read more