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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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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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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Many travelers these days often carry their entertainment with them, with iPods, portable DVD players and laptop computers. That is putting pressure on companies that provide on-demand video for hotel rooms, a business that is both consolidating and striving to innovate.

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When real-estate company RE/MAX International advertises with local cable operators, it typically asks them to air its commercials during home-improvement shows like A&E’s “Flip This House” and HGTV’s “House Hunters.” The idea is that viewers of such programs may also be in the market to buy or sell a house. Such logic makes sense, but advertisers these days are demanding more precision…

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A cable industry group’s decision yesterday to withdraw from further trials of eBay Inc.’s online TV-ad buying system could seriously set back plans to create an alternative advertising marketplace. The Cable television Advertising Bureau, a trade group that represents most major cable networks, said it wouldn’t participate in further testing of the Online Media Exchange system…

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Google Inc. has established a toehold in pursuing of one its next big ambitions: controlling which television ads viewers see and tailoring them to consumers’ interests. The Mountain View, Calif., company honed the highly profitable Internet model of search advertising – that is, selling ads targeted directly at consumers based on the terms they enter into Web search engines.

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THE AD LOOKS like many on television. It opens with shots of people holding and arranging flower bouquets, as a voice intones “special moments bring special memories.” A toll-free number and Web-site address, Devynns.com, is on-screen throughout, and the commercial closes by telling viewers Devynns also has two flower shops, in Pomona and Covina, Calif. Using a conventional ad agency, this message typically would cost thousands of dollars to make.

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