In an effort to accelerate merchant adoption of the Google Checkout payment system, especially at the peak of the holiday shopping season, Google is offering Free Google Checkout Transactions to its merchant base. Google Checkout sent the following email out to merchants: As you may know, for every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can [...]

Google Radio Advertising is close to being a reality as Reuters reports that the search engine & advertising company is planning on beginning a massive radio test of its AdWords Radio, which became a reality after Google’s acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting. Google Audio Ads will be able to be purchased via the Google AdWords interface [...]

Arnold Schwarzenegger did car commercials during his prime, Brad Pitt was pitching canned coffee in Japan until last year, and Bruce Willis is currently pushing Subaru, but the hottest new commercial series on Japanese television comes by way of Softbank, Yahoo Japan and Cameron Diaz. Cameron has been a mainstay in high profile Japanese advertising [...]

Today Microsoft went live with Virtual Earth 3D, an online mapping system which is part of the Live Search experience which serves local search mapped results in a three-dimensional setting. Currently Live Search offers 3-D results for 15 U.S. cities, which include San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, [...]

Click Forensics updated its enterprise-class click fraud detection service, Click Forensics 4.5 for Enterprise, which includes new features that allow advertisers for the first time to distinguish the click fraud rates of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that run on search engine sites and their affiliate properties, allowing them to adjust their campaign spending to maximize return [...]

Google is launching what it is calling an “alpha” program in which 100 advertisers, both large and small, will have an opportunity to buy ads of all sizes (not classifieds, but ROP) in over 50 US major metro daily print newspapers (not online). Combined, the participating dailies have more 15 million print circulation. Publishers participating [...]

Big news in terms of the expansion of social networking empire MySpace beyond US borders. Japanese company Softbank, which owns Yahoo Japan and Vodafone Japan (branded as Softbank), has partnered with News Corp’s Fox Interactive, the parent company of MySpace.com, to launch MySpace Japan. MySpace Japan will be a 50-50 venture between Fox and Softbank, [...]