With SBS, the network will not reach more than 7 million Hispanic radio listeners in leading markets including L.A., Chicago, NYC and Miami. HipCricket launched the network in April with inaugural partners Bustos Media, Davidson Group and Lotus Communications.

“This deal with SBS is a significant milestone in the growth of our network, and represents a strong endorsement by a major Hispanic media player of the power of mobile marketing for Hispanic audiences,” said Ivan Braiker, CEO of HipCricket. “We are grateful to all our Hispanic media partners for their leadership and vision in working with us to create a uniquely powerful mobile marketing platform connecting brands and advertisers with Hispanic consumers.”

It seems that now is the time to throw ad dollars at the Hispanic mobile marketing sector: In a recent Mobile Marketing Association study, 32% of Hispanic consumers indicated that they were moderately or highly receptive to mobile marketing messages. And they’re already equipped to receive those messages. And 75% of all U.S. Hispanic households have multiple mobile phones and use them more than any other form of personal technology on the market today — more than half regularly use text messaging.

HipCricket’s mobile platform is permission-based – and all messages are customized based on a consumer’s preferences.

Per the agreement, the threesome will use Click Forensics technology to filter out poor-quality PPC traffic before it adversely affects ad campaigns.

“Click Forensics continually scrubs out the low-quality traffic our advertisers want to avoid in their search marketing campaigns,” said Vinay Jatwani, CEO of Broadspring, Inc. “This means clients eliminate click fraud and reduce other forms of bad traffic, which translates into better campaign results and an improved return on advertising spend.”

Click Forensics said its Publishers & Ad Networks solution uses patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real time. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index, a compendium of industry-wide click fraud data.

According to the study, those who scored highest in leadership (“their style with others is both inclusive and decisive”) are 68% more likely to have purchased three of more computers in the past two years. Those scored highest in dynamism (“they believe the only place to be is in the thick of it; never on the sidelines”) are 58% more likely to have purchased three or more flat screen TVs in the past two years. Assertive people (“they know what they want and go after it with purpose”) are 62% more likely to purchase a new cell phone when the latest model hits the streets. Those who scored low in modesty (“they may be considered conceited or arrogant by others”) are cell phone enthusiasts and 45% more likely to upgrade when a new model’s available.

The study reaches far beyond the typical demographic data usually mined by marketers who want insight into the minds of their targets; as a result, it gives advertisers and marketers a powerful level of insight in how they should be crafting and executing their campaigns.

Mindset Media is an Internet ad network for brands.

The Internet has developed as a direct-response medium for the simple reason that interactivity, the property that distinguishes the Internet from traditional media, makes direct-response marketing easy and powerful. Interactivity allows users to indicate their interests, either through search or some other telling online behavior, and allows marketers to present offers directly to those users. Not surprisingly, the biggest ad spenders on the Internet today are direct-response marketers. What is needed to shift brand dollars online is a unique ad proposition for the medium “upstream”—in the areas of awareness building and preference shaping that account for the bulk of media spending by large, sophisticated marketers.

The question for this medium is: how do you harness interactivity, and its output data, in a way that can be put to use for brand advertisers on a mass scale? Well, even the most sophisticated, deep-pocketed marketers are limited in their ability to reach their real targets in media. Marketers like P&G, Ford, and American Express define their target consumers richly, less on the basis of undifferentiating demographics, and more on the basis of the “soft” values, the mindsets and habits, that drive demand and choice. Auto manufacturers, for example, see huge differences in the values of “SUV people” and “minivan people,” though these two critical targets are demographically identical. Marketers can refine their pitches to their target segments by developing tailored creative messages, but they have had no way to accomplish the same level of strategic targeting in media, because the media define mass targets on the basis of demographics, and little else.

Brand marketers have traditionally navigated around this shortcoming in media by “triangulating” their way to softer audience attributes via context. However, that is difficult to do in an environment where the majority of ad impressions reside in a rapidly expanding “Long Tail” and have limited scale applications. According to JP Morgan, this problem will only intensify: the number of Web pages and ad impressions are expected to grow by 15% in 2008 alone. This fragmentation presents a real challenge for brand marketers: they need a way to assemble enough inventory to effectively fill their upper funnels with the right people to become buyers at some point in the future. Marketers quickly reach a point of diminishing returns on their energy invested in assembling that inventory contextually.

Ad technology has the potential to deliver on the fundamental brand targeting need and resolve brand marketers’ issues with the fragmentation and complexity of the Internet. It can identify mass audiences that have a common set of characteristics, including psychographics – and reach them, no matter where they are on the Internet.
Ad technology is creating new and relevant handles for buying and selling Internet media. This creates a unique set of opportunities for both buyers and sellers of online media. Yet, the open question remains, one which will define the future of the online landscape: what side of the house will ad technology end up with, the buyer or the seller?

Millard, the newly minted co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia moderated a spirited discussion with five other industry vets that addressed the all-encompassing question: “Publishers and Ad Networks: Can This Marriage Be Saved?” and a host of other woes facing the online advertising industry.

“Is technology enough to sell an ad?” Millard asked at the beginning of the discussion. She posed another question: What’s more important — art or science?, adding that the oodles of inventory flooding the market (thanks to blogs and social networks) has made monetizing online ads a bigger challenge than ever. As cyberspace expands exponentially and the economy contracts, it’s clear that publishers and ad networks need to either oust one party out of the ad-selling ring or find common ground if they want to bring home the pork bellies, er, bacon.

The speakers – Brad Davis, SVP of online sales at Disney Online; Jarvis Coffin, co-founder and CEO of Burst Media; Matthew Boyd, SVP at ValueClick Media; Ed Montes, EVP and managing director at Havas Digital and Jim Spanfeller, president and CEO of Forbes.com – were obviously betting on different horses in the game.

As employees of ad networks, Coffin and Boyd were rooting for networks, stressing their unparalleled ability to target (“it’s all about hyper-targeting,” Coffin said), build and maintain existing relationships and get their inventory up pretty much anywhere online.

Boyd also boosted the importance of art or branding, saying that technology is not a panacea for the industry’s ills.

“Thinking of technology as a solution is a problem because it’s completely disconnected from consumers,” Boyd said, adding that a brand’s value can’t play second fiddle to science and that relationships are king in the advertising industry.

Some publishers aren’t buying the spiel, forming internal staffs to handle advertising, and making do without the networks’ help. Forbes.com, of course, is one of the publishers heading down this route.

“Ad networks need to re-evaluate how things are planned” and sold, Spanfeller said, near the end of the discussion. For Forbes, providing “value for our users, advertisers and publishers,” is part and parcel of their recent restructuring.

Agencies, of course, are cast as the concerned child of separation, watching on in horror as publishers and networks battle it out. “I haven’t been home in three weeks,” Montes exclaimed, to groans of sympathy from the crowd.

“The biggest challenge is adapting to and using technology,” he added. “Traditional agencies weren’t set up” for the quickly shifting online market, forcing them to lean on one-stop networks when they’d prefer to stand on their own.

But don’t count agencies out, Montes said, adding that as they’ve increasingly manned up on the tech side, they’ve watched networks face the same kind of competition from search engines that agencies once faced from networks. “Yahoo is the world’s largest ad network,” Montes said, grinning.

Major and minor disagreements aside about whether art of science should take the lead in designing and executing a campaign, everyone agreed on one thing: the industry still has a lot to learn when it came to leveraging ad networks and online advertising exchanges in the most fiscally beneficial way possible.

But, the execs made it sound like with a little counseling and a lot more open communication, the marriage can be saved after all. Which is basically the same conclusion the industry reached circa 1997: YES networks still have “a lot to offer” in the marketplace.

Navic helps advertisers get targeted, interactive spots on cable television. The company’s ads are essentially overlays and are analogous to online video ads. They’re targeted by zip code and customers can click on the overlay if they more information on the products being shilled.

The company doesn’t currently have a presence online, and many industry observers speculate that Microsoft will not only use Navic to leverage the still-robust TV ad market, but also drag them online.

Google has already moved in that direction, allowing customers to buy TV ads through AdWords.

Microsoft will put Navic under its Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group umbrella.

Google sites accounted for 4.1 billion videos viewed, or 38% of the total – YouTube accounted for 98% of all Google videos watched. Fox Interactive Media came in a distant second with 558 million videos seen, or 5.1%, followed by Yahoo with 352 million, or 3.2% and Microsoft Sites with 268 million, or 2.4%.

71% of Internet users (about 135 million people) watched videos online in April – the average viewer took in 228 minutes of video (or 82 videos each). Unsurprisingly, 18-34 year olds watched the most videos on line, clocking in at 287 minutes per viewer on average.

The ThoughtWorthy site (which redirects to TVGuide.com) allows TV viewers to identify, research and purchase the music, products and ads they see on TV. Macrovision said it will make available the data across its platforms, including online and mobile.

“ThoughtWorthy’s technology adds another exciting dimension to our metadata offerings,” said Paul Greenberg, executive vice president and general manager of TV Guide Online at Macrovision. “By enabling TV fans to go to TVGuide.com and obtain comprehensive data and purchase the music they hear on their favorite TV Shows, we are building on our vision to bring consumers a more enjoyable, fulfilling digital home entertainment experience.”

Macrovision Solutions enables customers to discover, acquire and manage digital content. It also operates entertainment portals TVGuide.com and allmusic.com.

The unit, GM Planworks, is under the Starcom MediaVest Group umbrella. GM is preparing to shift 50% of its $3 billion ad budget into digital and one-to-one marketing within the next three years, AdAge reports.

“It is always difficult to make these decisions,” Laura Desmond, Starcom’s CEO, said in a statement. “But we must also heed the evolving landscape, and we believe a streamlined model will allow us to make more strategic investments in the capabilities that are driving growth in this industry, including digital talent and tools, multicultural, consumer intelligence/research and innovative vendor partnership opportunities — assets that become increasingly vital to the success of all consumer connection plans.”

Panettiere joins a star-studded board of spokespeople – including Pierce Brosnan, Isabel Lucas and Keely Shaye Smith – created to draw attention to the industrial killing of whales and dolphins.

Some of her wardrobe items on the block: a Dooney & Bourke handbag and an Alice + Olivia pleated black and white dress that she wore to the premiere of It’s a Mall World.

The items can be found here.

Panettiere joined Zude earlier this year to launch Fanbase – a feature that allows Zude users to build fan sites and gives them exclusive access to images, videos and music. Zude users who are members of her Fanbase can visit her home page and click on the Panettiere Closet storefront widget to embed it in their sites.

Shopit marries commerce and social networking; users can build widgets, upload items and list them for sale.