Digital Media

This won't come as a surprise to, well, anyone who has spent considerable time on the Web, but a new study found that people act much differently online than offline.

According to eMarketer, which published the report on Monday, "cyberdisinhibition" has caused many Web users to behave much differently online than they would in a typical offline setting. In fact, the market-research firm, which cites findings from Euro RSCG Worldwide, says 43 percent of U.S.-based Web users feel less inhibited online. It also found that "the effect is most prominent among females and users ages 25 to 54."

Of course, being less inhibited online can lead to both positive and negative behaviors. The research firm found that the Web helps 55.6 percent of men and 51.4 percent of women feel more "able to to meet new people." Users are also using the Web to "be empowered to do something they wanted to." The study found that 33.9 percent of male respondents and 29.2 percent of female respondents do things on the Web that they might not otherwise feel able to do offline.

That said, Web users are also more likely to take a company or brand to task online than they would in person. The study found that 24.4 percent of male respondents have "lashed out" at companies on the Internet. Women did it a little less with about 15.8 percent of respondents saying that they had lashed out.

eMarketer's report also highlighted an interesting change in the way people prefer to communicate. A whopping 48.7 percent of respondents said they find electronic communication far more convenient than communicating with others in a face-to-face setting.

From a social perspective, 57.6 percent of respondents said they disagree with the assertion that "online socializing is for sad, antisocial types." Phew. That's how I communicate these days.

For Madison Avenue, Facebook just got a little less free.

Last week, the massive social network announced that brands, advertisers, and marketers that want to run contests or sweepstakes on its platform have to go through an approval process first.

Getting that approval could be a new revenue stream for Facebook: according to multiple sources in the marketing industry, they're being told that running a promotion in a Facebook application or "fan page" requires buying ad space too.

It's pricey. The minimum ad buy is $10,000 for 30 days, using Facebook's self-service advertising system, according to documents seen by CNET, or $30,000 for 30 days of Facebook home page ads. Priority in the approval process will be scaled, based on how much advertising space has been purchased. It's a move that one marketing industry professional called, in perhaps a bit of hyperbole, "a little Death Star-ish."

A Facebook representative declined to confirm and said the company did not have any comment beyond official documents released on its Facebook Marketing Solutions page.

Let's step back. Cracking down on contests and promotions might seem draconian, but it's actually important for Facebook: the U.S. state and federal laws that govern sweepstakes are extremely complicated, and by allowing only approved contests, Facebook is making sure that its bases are covered.

"Any promotion that any brand, product, or company would run has to have a terms of service against it," said Gunter Pfau, CEO of the Stuzo Group, an agency that has developed numerous Facebook contests and sweepstakes for clients. "Also, depending on the prize value, they need to be filed with various state regulatory agencies."

What, exactly, is new for contests? If a brand is running a contest on its fan page, it has to be handled through an embedded, separately developed application--not, for example, in the page's "wall." Promotions also can't involve Facebook users manipulating their user photos or status messages specifically for the contest.

Legal experts agree that this is necessary. "The (new Facebook) guidelines really cover only a narrow subset of promotions, specifically sweepstakes, contests, and similar competitions," explained Thomas Williams, a partner at the Chicago law firm Howrey, who specializes in trademark law. "That type of contest or promotion is governed by a myriad of state and federal regulations, so what I think Facebook is attempting to do here is merely shield itself from liability that arises out of its users' potential violations of these laws."

Williams continued: "I think it's a prudent and reasonable step on Facebook's part. There are lawyers who specialize in sweepstakes law, and there really are a lot of twists and turns to it."

One thing it'll also do, Stuzo Group's Gunter Pfau explained, is keep dishonest campaigns and promotions off the Facebook platform. "I think it's great news for consumers," he said. "I think what Facebook is doing is really laying these guidelines in place for companies to protect consumers more."

But what about the new ad spend requirements? Facebook has historically pitched its developer platform and fan pages as a free way for advertisers and marketers to tap into the power of "the social graph"--its 300 million-plus active users and their connections to one another. And while it's clear that the company sees these free pages and applications as a stepping stone for ad dollars--Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, for example, regularly gives Madison Avenue talks about the company's "engagement ads"--it doesn't have a long track record of requiring advertisers to pay for something that used to be free.

"It makes sense for Facebook, but (it's) a little discouraging to advertisers," commented Alisa Leonard-Hansen, who holds the title of social-media evangelist at digital-marketing firm iCrossing. "Facebook is continually trying to discover new ways to monetize, and they picked up on the trend that advertisers were using their pages to run contests and other promotions. I think Facebook was looking to be able to benefit from this marketing trend."

The ad spend requirements, too, could be considered partial compensation for the new human resources required in Facebook's approval process. Each company running contests on Facebook now has a designated advertising sales representative, and fan pages will continue to have to be policed for potential violations of both advertiser regulations and sweepstakes law.

There might not be a lot of friction as the new regulations go into effect. Companies that don't run contests on their Facebook fan pages or applications won't be affected. Even some that do, especially small-scale fan pages that could easily go unnoticed by Facebook, won't have to change much. "Of course, there are going to be savvy marketers who skirt this and run (contests) under the radar," Alisa Leonard-Hansen said.

It really goes without saying the obvious: this is Facebook's service, and it can do what it wants with it. That doesn't mean marketers will stop grumbling. As one put it in a phone call to CNET, "This is another example of Facebook saying, 'Sorry, eat it, you've got no choice.'"

Amazon Twitter integration

(Credit: Screenshot-Dave Rosenberg)

Amazon Associates is the partner program the company uses as part of its affiliate advertising programs, allowing customers to make money advertising Amazon products.

Associates can now simply click a link in the toolbar to send a link (replete with sales-y text) to Twitter as part of their shopping and selling experience. Amazon gets a sale, Twitter gets traffic, and the associate gets revenue share. What could possibly go wrong?

Linking to Amazon or other online retailers is obviously nothing new, though Amazon has been particularly successful in using its link networks for both sales and to garner higher Google rankings for organic advertising.

This new program does introduce an issue related to link fraud, where spammers and scammers leverage URL-shortening services for spam links. Currently there is no way to verify that the link you click actually goes to Amazon. It's a bit surprising that it decided to use an URL-shortener that it doesn't own, though I suppose the network effect of the URLs helps perpetuate the life of the links.

There is also a risk of nondisclosure wherein in Twitter users attempt to push products that offer some kind of gain to them that they don't clearly state to you. While I understand the argument for disclosure on blogs and media in general, Twitter remains a playground for people to post whatever they want. I highly doubt all the celebrities with accounts would bother wasting their precious time if they weren't posting for their own gain.

Interestingly, there is no mention of whether Twitter is an Amazon Associate, suggesting that Twitter won't see any of the revenue share. I'd like to think that they cut a deal that gives them a piece of the pie, but to date we haven't seen Twitter monetize itself too effectively.

Twitter is quickly becoming the flash news vehicle for everything from news alerts to product placement. And based on a very quick review of my Bitly account, Twitter users just love to click on links. But, I still have to wonder if Twitter will ever get beyond its current role as a marketing tool?

Beverage brand Vitaminwater, known for both tasty thirst quenchers and creative marketing, on Tuesday launched "Flavorcreator" a Facebook application designed to crowdsource ideas for new beverage flavors. The company plans to announce the new flavor in December, with the product slated to hit shelves next March.

In addition to voting on new flavors, Flavorcreator lets users play games and win prizes while providing the company with valuable market research and building brand awareness.

Although I still don't personally enjoy Facebook, I do think that it has potential as a marketing tool. There is clear value in targeting and defining a target audience segment in this way, provided that the application is attractive and well-designed (Flavorcreator is both), presumably leading to higher levels of interest and user interaction.

Does Flavorcreator make you thirsty?

(Credit: Vitaminwater)

At one point sources said he was a "dark horse" candidate to replace outgoing MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, but now MySpace ad sales and marketing head Jeff Berman is departing the News Corp. division entirely.

Following rumors and reports earlier Thursday, the announcement was made in a company blog post by Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who ultimately did replace DeWolfe as CEO of MySpace earlier this year. Berman, who had previously been the head of MySpace's video division, had been at MySpace for about three and a half years.

MySpace has enlisted the services of media strategy firm Media Link to work on improving its advertising product, Van Natta's blog post added. Media Link is run by Wenda Harris Millard, the former sales exec from Yahoo and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

A report earlier on Thursday had suggested that Millard would be hired by MySpace outright; that was erroneous, as it turns out.

Earlier this week, MySpace also formally confirmed rumors that it would be acquiring iLike, a social music service that's also supported by advertising--but not successfully enough to rake in real dollars, as its price tag was reportedly a paltry $20 million.

NEW YORK--Broadcast network CBS will be advertising its fall TV season with a video-chip ad embedded in an issue of Entertainment Weekly.

The September 18 issue of the Time Inc.-owned magazine will feature the first video ad to appear in print, George Schweitzer, CBS marketing president, said Wednesday at a press conference at the company's headquarters here.

The ad with embedded video.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

The ad will be launched in partnership with PepsiCo to promote Pepsi Max soda and the TV network's Monday prime-time lineup. Not everyone will be seeing it: the ad will appear in a magazine insert sent to subscribers in the New York and Los Angeles areas--an edition without the video chip will be sent to subscribers elsewhere and show up on newsstands.

The technology for the battery-powered ads was manufactured by a Los Angeles-based company called Americhip, and each ad can handle about 40 minutes of video.

Here are some more details about the Americhip technology: the screen, which is 2.7 millimeters thick, has a 320x240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged, believe it or not, with a mini USB cord--there's a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. It's a product that has been in development at Americhip for about two years, spokesman Tim Clegg told CNET News via e-mail.

"It's leadership in innovation, which we really stress at CBS in every part of our company," Schweitzer said of the ads, which were developed with the collaboration of the Ignition Factory, a division of the Omnicom Group's OMD media agency.

PepsiCo has been experimenting with edgy, experimental ads for some time now, distributing millions of 3D glasses for its SoBe LifeWater Super Bowl ad earlier this year. It more recently launched a new Mountain Dew flavor by inviting prominent Twitter users to a party at a trendy Brooklyn venue.

Pepsi Max is the company's new diet soda geared toward men, advertised earlier this summer with bold print ads that declared, "Save the calories for bacon."

"The evolution of marketing television in the fall--it used to be as simple as this," Schweitzer said, holding up a vintage copy of TV Guide. "It was axiomatic in those days. If you took an ad in TV Guide, people watched your program. Not anymore."

Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

This post was updated at 1:38 p.m. PT with more details about Americhip's technology.

The dot-com era had eToys, Webvan, and Pets.com. The digital-entertainment boom has SpiralFrog.

The day SpiralFrog likely reserved a corner in the pantheon of the Web's most noteworthy busts came on July 14, 2008. At 2 a.m. that day, an agitated Amir Khan, an executive at hedge fund 3V Capital Management, SpiralFrog's main financial backer, e-mailed several fellow board members at the pioneering ad-supported music service.

Khan was frustrated by SpiralFrog's marketing efforts. In one case, the start-up spent $300,000 to host a video from pop singer Alicia Keys that managers claimed would draw 1 million new users. But without any of her hit songs in the clip, only 5,000 visitors showed up. Khan then zeroed in on SpiralFrog's spending.

The costs associated with search engine and affiliate marketing, which he termed as "buying traffic," were too high. In addition, Khan warned that investors and advertisers were sure to figure out that visitors to the site did little there but land and leave.

"The people we seem to be attracting to our site from the affiliate-marketing programs are NOT interested in music," Khan wrote. "Hence the low registration rate, pages per visit, time on our site, high bounce rate. I refuse to believe that people in the advertising world and the potential acquirers will not see this as buying traffic."

As for the Keys debacle, Khan aimed a thinly veiled attack at then-CEO Mel Schrieberg and his staff. These "marketing programs accomplished just one thing: they made me sick."

A January income statement shows that SpiralFrog lost $26 million in 2008 on revenue of $1.2 million.

(Credit: Screenshot by Greg Sandoval/CNET)

While efforts were later made to improve user loyalty, Khan's warning went largely unheeded. Costs continued to balloon, and a business model that required the start-up to spend 10 cents to earn a penny was never fully re-evaluated. The company, which some had predicted could snatch away the digital-download throne from the reining power, Apple's iTunes, lost a staggering amount of money and flamed out.

On March 19, 2009, the day the service folded, SpiralFrog owed more than $40 million. In 2008, records show, the company burned through $26.3 million while generating sales of just $1.2 million.

Plenty of pundits blamed the company's demise on the big music labels and the large licensing fees they charge, as well as the economic crisis that gripped the country last fall. Certainly, both played a part. But former insiders paint a much broader picture of SpiralFrog's spinout.

CNET News has examined the company's rapid tumble and reviewed dozens of communications, legal records, invoices, and expenditures--documents that were provided by former board directors, executives, and employees. Many of those individuals agreed to be interviewed, though most requested anonymity.

SpiralFrog's story will sound familiar to anyone who was paying attention to technology during the Internet bubble era. It had all the traits of many late-1990s dot-coms: an inexperienced and divided leadership, wild spending, and what former executives there now conclude was a flawed business model.

In a two-day report, CNET News offers a rare look inside a sinking start-up whose tale could explain much about ad-supported music services' continuing challenges. SpiralFrog, like its ad-supported music peers, was supposed to provide an attractive and legal alternative to music piracy, but these sites have yet to prove that free music can translate into profits.

Ruckus, an ad-supported service catering to college students, for example, closed this year, just ahead of SpiralFrog. Another popular but profitless streaming site, Imeem, ran into serious financial trouble earlier this year, before negotiating better terms from the music labels. Imeem is now rejiggering its business model and is "headed toward profitability," a company representative said.

Look out, iTunes
Founded in 2004, SpiralFrog would wait three years before finally launching its Web site. The company's goal was to give away music and support itself by selling advertising, just as traditional radio had done for decades. Instead of broadcasting music, SpiralFrog would offer digital downloads, a la iTunes.

One of SpiralFrog's main weaknesses, however, was that its downloads were incompatible with Apple's iPod, the world's best-selling digital-music player. Another was that it secured licensing deals with only two of the four major music labels.

Nonetheless, SpiralFrog executives claimed that fans of illegal peer-to-peer sites would flock to a legal source of free music, and advertisers would follow. SpiralFrog's management also believed that the record companies would rush to do business with anyone who competed directly with illegal peer-to-peer sites.

By licensing its vast music library to SpiralFrog in May 2006, Vivendi-owned Universal Music Group, the largest of the top four recording companies, handed SpiralFrog almost instant credibility. SpiralFrog became the first company to convince a major music label to offer downloads on an ad-supported basis.

But even then, there were leadership troubles. A nasty fight for control of the company between Joe Mohen, SpiralFrog's founder and chairman, and then-CEO Robin Kent resulted in Kent's departure on December 26, 2006.

With Kent out, some of SpiralFrog's original financial backers stopped funding the company. The New York-based company ran into its first financial troubles before debuting the site on September 17, 2007.

Six months later, SpiralFrog made the bold claim that its 850,000 registered users made it "the third-largest legal music download site in (the United States) and Canada." Only iTunes and Rhapsody, operated by RealNetworks and MTV, were larger--or so the company said.

At about the same time, SpiralFrog appeared to have come into big money. The staff swelled from 12 in early 2007 to more than 30 by springtime the next year. Several longtime music industry veterans joined the company, and in June 2008, SpiralFrog cut a licensing deal with EMI, its second major label. To some observers, the fledgling music service was on a roll.

"We built a very strong brand and image in the marketplace in a short period of time," said Schrieberg, SpiralFrog's CEO from January 2007 until October 2008. "(We) did not have the opportunity to fully realize our potential."

According to documents and insiders, however, most of SpiralFrog's accomplishments were a mirage.

Traffic jam
SpiralFrog executives always had a simple plan to grow their business: build an audience through aggressive marketing and then turn casual visitors into loyal users. Schrieberg and the board agreed that the main goal should be to attract what the former CEO calls "tier-1 advertisers," companies such as Nike, AT&T, and McDonald's.

SpiralFrog's traffic for two years. The dramatic July 2008 falloff coincides with the board's decision to cut spending on affiliate marketing. Traffic bottoms out in October, when money starts running out.

(Credit: Google Analytics)

"When I visited McDonald's and some other tier-1 accounts," Schrieberg said in an interview, "we found that in order for a tier-1 account to place ads on a site like SpiralFrog, (it) needed a minimum of 5 million monthly unique (visitors). Our thought was that we needed to build volume and then swing over to quality. If you didn't build the volume, you could never get ads on the site from tier-1 advertisers."

That was the plan. The execution was something different.

SpiralFrog managers began dabbling in search engine marketing early in 2008. That's the practice of paying search engines to map Web site links and small ads to the results pages for particular search terms. This helped the company top 2 million visitors in March 2008 and 3 million the next month.

The growth was good, but SpiralFrog's leaders wanted more. Schrieberg and the board then tried affiliate-marketing programs, mostly at AOL's Platform-A. AOL promised to spread the start-up's brand across its own sites, as well as hundreds of affiliated sites.

In June, the company exceeded its original traffic goal when it recorded 6 million visitors for the month. But instead of celebrating, a few at the company were chewing their fingernails. To attract those visitors, the company had paid dearly.

According to a list of projected expenditures from July 2008, SpiralFrog expected to spend $2.8 million with Google that year and $1.5 million with Yahoo. Charges at rival MSN are unclear. The tab for AOL's affiliate marketing in 2008 was more than $3 million, an AOL attorney confirmed. According to a copy of an income statement completed in January 2009, SpiralFrog's 2008 sales and marketing expenses came to $11 million--nearly twice the $5.6 million the company paid in music licensing that year.

Not all of that was search engine marketing. There were the promotional costs, which included the $300,000 sunk into the much-ignored Alicia Keys video, $200,000 tied to the National Football League, and $500,000 plunked down on "microsite" SpiralFrogClub.com.

While the Keys video cost the company about $60 for each of the 5,000 registered users it brought to the site, the NFL deal saw even worse results. SpiralFrog paid about $490 for each of the registered users it generated, records show. SpiralFrogClub, meanwhile, attracted a dismal 225 registrations in the first month and was scuttled by September 2008.

None of these missteps were lost on the man who paid most of SpiralFrog's bills: Scott Stagg, the managing director of 3V Capital Management (now called Stagg Capital), the Connecticut-based hedge fund that bankrolled the company for nearly two years. On May 18, 2008, in a response to an e-mail from Schrieberg about the importance of unique visitors, Stagg clarified what he thought the company should focus on.

He noted that SpiralFrog had initially projected 2008 revenue at $55 million, then reduced estimates in January that year to $25 million, then reduced them again three months later to $3 million. "Uniques are great, but hedge funds want to see revenue," he implored.

Stagg e-mailed Mohen and Schrieberg again on June 3, saying he wouldn't be able to "lend the company any more money" and he suggested that Schrieberg "might be prudent to conserve the cash you have by slowing down significantly the paid searches, especially since we are not generating advertising dollars."

Despite all the spending on marketing, SpiralFrog was generating little ad revenue and seeing hardly any increase in active users, according to Khan, the No. 2 man at 3V.

AOL's Advertising.com delivered clicks, but SpiralFrog couldn't turn that traffic into registrations. SpiralFrogClub's lone purpose was to promote the music service. But what would promote the promotion site?

(Credit: Screenshot by Greg Sandoval/CNET)

"(Management) said, 'We are starting to get orders from advertisers at a pretty high CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions),'" investor Khan said in an interview. "They did get a few, and they said they would get a lot more. We had doubts. Stagg initially thought (Schrieberg) was right, but eventually, he swung around to the opinion that this was just a waste of time. Nothing was getting converted into real traffic. But by that time, we were in the middle of talks with Viacom."

In the summer of 2008, Viacom, the conglomerate behind MTV and Paramount Pictures, had expressed interest in investing in SpiralFrog. According to Khan, the start-up's leadership couldn't pull back on marketing for fear that a drop-off in traffic would spook Viacom out of the deal.

SpiralFrog had built an image as a digital-music up-and-comer by buying traffic. To preserve that image, the company needed to keep buying.

"Amir and I have been having many discussions concerning our site traffic," Schrieberg wrote to several board members in an August e-mail that asked for the authorization to spend $250,000 on search engine marketing. "We both agree that we need to achieve in the area of 5 million monthly uniques to preserve the Viacom strategic alliance."

Self-deception, a little secret
There's nothing illegal or unethical about paying for clicks. Thousands of companies do it every day to advertise their Web sites and services. Google's AdWords service, which supports pay-per-click advertising, is what fueled the company's meteoric rise. Google earned $21 billion from AdWords last year alone.

Like many other companies, SpiralFrog tried to market itself as a popular service to improve its chances of attracting advertisers, according to documents and former employees. The problem was that its traffic couldn't be sustained without costly search engine and affiliate marketing.

Sites with loyal followings usually don't have to do this, said Andrew Frank, an analyst at research firm Gartner. While some advertisers are happy with raw traffic, most typically want to partner with sites that attract lots of return visitors and maintain engaged audiences, he said.

"The smoking gun is if the traffic disappears when you stop buying," Frank said. "The idea is not to buy traffic. It's to generate loyalty...Most of the top sites don't talk clicks. They talk about active users, people who come back multiple times in a month."

In October 2008, SpiralFrog got a chance to see how the site fared without the marketing efforts. The month before, Viacom had informed SpiralFrog's leadership that it would not invest. Following that, Stagg cut off funding. When the marketing programs were halted, traffic numbers crashed. SpiralFrog saw just 775,547 unique visitors in October, a fraction of the site's monthly peak of 7 million. Records show that the number of monthly visitors hovered around the 800,000 mark until the site shut down its operations.

One person who was with SpiralFrog from start to finish was Vesa Suomalainen, its chief technology officer. According to Khan, Suomalainen's tech team was the only SpiralFrog unit that performed well. In multiple e-mails during 2008, Suomalainen revealed his skepticism of the company's spending.

On September 24, 2008, as SpiralFrog prepared to push on without Stagg's money, Suomalainen began an e-mail debate with Mohen, the company's founder and chairman. Suomalainen urged Mohen not to spend more resources on search engine or affiliate marketing.

Click the image above to read our story on what SpiralFrog tells us about ad-supported music. Stories on SpiralFrog's internal strife and customers' private information will appear Tuesday.

"For a while, I guess we all were sold...on the 'momentum theory,'" Suomalainen wrote. "The belief was that if we demonstrated solid user growth and increased the number of unique visitors, it would open more doors for us at advertisers and music labels, and amongst the press and music industry. The cost did not matter, since the exposure would be temporary, and we would switch from paid to organic growth in a matter of months, if not weeks.

"I started arguing in late spring that this is, if not outright cheating...at least self-deception," he continued. "We were claiming super-unique user growth while we knew we were just getting users to bounce off our site. Our approach was not far from hiring Internet users in India to click on our home page to get the unique-visitor number to continue growing.

"Anyone who'd ask (SpiralFrog) direct questions about average...time spent on (the) site, or average number of page views, or retention of registered users would immediately find out our little secret," he wrote. "These figures stay permanently in our books for incoming investors to look at and ask us after the fact. How do we explain spending $1.5 million in marketing in the month of June when our resulting revenue was $69,711--an oops?"

Editors' note: Another story about SpiralFrog's last days, called "How turf wars and miscues crippled SpiralFrog," will appear Tuesday.

Update 1:15 p.m. PDT: Added quotes from Vertrue.

Vertrue, which operates a so-called Web loyalty program, apparently isn't as forthcoming with information as some U.S. Senators would like.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate's Commerce Committee issued a subpoena to Vertrue requiring that the privately held company turn over documents that committee investigators requested in May, including communications with business partners and credit card companies.

Companies like Norwalk, Conn.-based Vertue, along with WebLoyalty and Affinion, are marketers that make "cash-back" and coupon offers to consumers and charge those who enroll in their loyalty programs. The three are under investigation after scores of consumers complained that they were duped into paying monthly fees.

(Credit: Vertrue.com)

George Thomas, a Vertrue spokesman, said that it was Vertrue execs who requested the subpoena as they would refuse to give up consumers' privacy unless ordered to by authorities.

"We requested in writing that the subpoena be issued and that's because one of the items requested was consumer information," Thomas said, "including consumer complaints and inquiries over the course of a decade, which would include personally identifiable information about the consumer."

In a CNET News story published last week, WebLoyalty said that its service is popular with the vast majority of users. Typically, Web loyalty programs--which offer discounts or cash back if the customer just enters an e-mail--present offers as a consumer is about to finish a purchase. Many who complain about the programs say that the terms are tucked into a dense field of fine print and graphics.

Also, many consumers who allegedly "opt in" to the program don't know that by just keying in their e-mail address, companies like Vertrue and WebLoyalty can acquire access to their credit cards. WebLoyalty's CEO, Rick Fernandes, said last week that his company pays retailers such as Buy.com, Fandango, and Orbitz for access to their customers' cards.

It's worth noting that while Thomas and Vertrue say they wouldn't give up consumers' private information unless ordered to, Buy.com, Fandango and Orbitz appear to have a much lower threshold for sharing that information.

For anybody looking for more information, they should visit Consumerist.com, which has done an excellent job of covering WebLoyalty and Vertrue for several months. To see a long list of consumers complaints about these companies, try here.

As the 'Superbad' character McLovin taught us, a name change can make all the difference.

(Credit: Columbia Pictures)

It's out with the not-so-old and in with the new for AOL CEO Tim Armstrong as he commemorates 100 days at the helm of the dot-conglomerate. Less than a year after AOL launched a new brand called "MediaGlow to encompass all its publishing properties, the company is getting rid of the name and reestablishing it as the far less cute "AOL Media." The company's advertising division, Platform-A, is now "AOL Advertising."

And the properties grouped into the "People Networks" division that was established when AOL acquired social network Bebo (for way too much money) will be worked into three new divisions: AOL Communication, AOL Local and Mapping, and AOL Ventures.

The announcements were made at the latest stop for the "100 Days of Tim Armstrong" party train, a company "revival" meeting in a massive air-conditioned tent (yes, like an evangelical preacher, Tim Armstrong threw a tent revival) in which employees were encouraged to post to Twitter about the goings-on and tag it all with #aol100.

Business Insider was watching the tweets roll in, and picked up on Armstrong's announcement of the division name changes.

But on a more serious note, this does represent a strategic shift in direction for AOL, at least on the marketing front. Brands like Platform-A and MediaGlow seemed to consciously avoid the AOL moniker, which still hasn't shaken off the connotations of late-'90s dial-up access. Armstrong, it appears, believes that keeping "AOL" in there will actually make things stronger--he comes, after all, from Google, which proudly displays its primary-colored logo on virtually all of its properties. At the very least, it'll express a bit more internal faith in the viability of the AOL brand.

Maybe they can do a "you've got mail" mashup remix while they're at it.

UPDATE at 5:21 p.m. PT: Reader David Montgomery made some hilarious art for the occasion, inspired by the poster for the new movie "500 Days of Summer":

(Credit: David Montgomery)