Web marketers can easily tell whether a particular consumer visited a specific site, when she visited, and whether she bought something. But despite a decades-long head start, television advertisers haven’t been as successful connecting the shows people watch to the products they buy. Now a new media research company, TRA – for “True ROI Accountability for Media” – is taking another crack at the problem. It merges data from people’s cable set-top boxes with consumer-purchase databases…

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The heads of the radio-advertising firm bought by Google Inc. a year ago have left the company as the Internet giant faces skepticism about its efforts to sell ads on radio stations. Google confirmed the departures of Chad Steelberg and Ryan Steelberg, brothers who led the radio-ad firm dMarc Broadcasting Inc. and sold it to Google last year for $102 million, plus the potential for $1.1 billion in performance-based payments tied to revenue and ad-inventory targets.

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GOOGLE INC. has been racing to extend its reach on the Internet and in traditional media. Now it needs advertisers to follow. Among those it is wooing is Alan Cohen, chief marketing officer of Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc.

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SPOT RUNNER RAISES MONEY from a raft of media and advertising heavyweights. CBS Corp. and two advertising holding companies, WPP Group PLC and Interpublic Group, each took a minority stake in Spot Runner after participating with several others in a $40 million round of financing for the closely held firm. Spot Runner, of Los Angeles, helps small businesses create…

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The fact that an executive from Garrand Marketing Communications bested thousands of competitors to win the right to produce a TV spot for the Super Bowl is, of course, big news. It would be big news for any winner. The fact that he works for an agency in Portland, Maine, is big news only because we don’t think of ourselves as a major player in the advertising business.

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CBS is about to start showing some skin. About a year after they were introduced, a handful of video-ad formats-called bugs, tickers and skin – are jockeying to become the favorites among marketers. The skin format, in which the ad appears in a graphic surrounding the window where the video plays, has been slower to gain momentum because it isn’t widely available on top video sites.

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A consortium of movie exhibitors has obtained the backing of five Hollywood studios for a plan to help finance the rollout of digital cinema equipment in U.S. theaters, bolstering the effort to make products like 3-D cinema widely available. Though the transformation to digital projectors in theaters has been discussed for a decade, only in the past few months have a number of Hollywood’s biggest studios signed on to the project.

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For a few days in May, network executives and media buyers gather for the “upfront,” the television industry’s most lucrative – and over-the-top – ritual. For almost 50 years, ad buyers have made the annual trek to New York to watch TV execs outline their networks’ fall-season offerings, negotiate for billions of dollars in advertising time and indulge in endless servings of demographic jargon and chilled jumbo shrimp.

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The companies behind a controversial new online exchange for buying ad time on television are moving ahead with their plan to test the system, over the objections of many TV networks, which argue that it could erode prices. The Online Media Exchange system, which was created last fall by eBay…

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Google is extending its advertising reach into a new medium with the announcement in January of its agreement to acquire dMarc Broadcasting Inc. The deal, expected to close this quarter, means an initial $102 million in cash for the radio ad platform provider with performance-based payouts to come. But what does Google’s move into radio advertising mean for retailer search marketers?

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