A Little Growth Is Better Than Zero Growth.

Another downward trending forcast, this time from eMarketer. The research firm has removed a digit from its 2009 interactive advertising spend forecast.

eMarketer's predicting 8.9 percent growth in ad spend next year, as opposed to the double-digit call they (and most other firms) were making last summer - in their case, 14.5 percent.

Glum? You shouldn't be. Growth is growth. You'd rather be working in financial services or the auto industry and experience negative growth? Times are tough all over, but up is still up.

iPhone App Rides the River of News.

Is it true an iPhone app is released every time a phone rings?

Well maybe not, but it almost seems that way. A friend of mine had way too much fun showing me a level last weekend using the spectrometer inside the phone.

Zumobi has launched yet another new iPhone app. The company, which used to operate under the name ZenZui, develops graphical user interfaces for mobile. It just released Ziibii, a free iPhone app that brings in feeds such as social network updates, news, new Flickr and YouTube media, and Twitter posts. Currently ads are limited to other iPhone apps but in Q1 ads will be sold to other brands.

The application may take the "river of news" metaphor a bit too literally, though. It appears as a pool of water with rafts floating across the screen. Each raft is a Flickr photo, a blog post, a news story, or a tweet. Ad units are also in the form of rafts. You pinch and drag the rafts to expand items just as you do any other app or Web page on the iPhone. And if you start to feel a little seasick, you can change the settings to display the feeds without the serene water.

SEMPO to Ring NASDAQ Bell on Cyber Monday.

Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) chair Dana Todd will ring the opening NASDAQ bell on Cyber Monday, December 1. SEMPO members in the area are invited to join her but shouldn’t just show up at Times Square. Instead, get in touch with SEMPO to make arrangements.

MySpace Music Grabs MTV Man, Industry Vet.

Courtney Holt's LinkedIn page says he's still EVP Digital, Music Group at MTV Networks, but the music industry vet was just named the new president of MySpace Music.

Holt will start at Fox Interactive Media-owned Myspace January 5. According to a company press release, he'll oversee MySpace Music growth and development globally.

Currently, MySpace Music offers ad-supported audio and video and enhanced sponsorship opportunities for advertisers, in addition to e-commerce functions for portable music and related merchandise.

Holt, of course, will seek out new ways of making money through the music site. "The new company will explore different and evolutionary revenue streams that provide real opportunities for artists and the industry as a whole," he stated in the release.

Organic Exec Predicts Greater Digital Reach in '09.

This post was written by Douglas Quenqua

The coming year in advertising is predicted to be, if nothing else, unpredictable. In a talk with ClickZ News, Adam Turinas, EVP of client engagement at digital agency Organic, suggested digital could benefit.

Ad spending is likely to drop next year, which could drive more money to digital media. Turinas, who heads up Bank of America’s interactive account at the Omnicom shop, believes this will lead to more instances of “the digital tail wagging the traditional dog,” meaning digital will be at the center of client initiatives. As a result, interactive work will be activated across all channels.

“We’re already working with clients by taking the digital experience into the retail environment,” he said. Discussing the retail sector, he added, “I would expect to see things like a kiosk or a tool for the store associate to work with, more like utilities that help customers answer questions.”

Of course, it is not surprising that a digital agency executive would predict that digital work would dominate in the coming year. And it’s worth noting that the model Turinas predicts—using media primarily as a tool to accommodate consumer need—is precisely the philosophy espoused by Organic.

But most forecasts for the ad market in 2009 make it hard to argue against the idea that digital will gain prominence. In October, media firm Zenith Optimedia revised its previous prediction of 3.9 percent growth for ad spending in 2009 to a meager .9 percent. Meanwhile, eMarketer’s most recent forecast for online ad spending calls for growth of 8.9 percent—considerably stronger, though also revised from previous prediction of double-digit growth.

Starbucks: Cause Marketing and a 5 Cent Debate.

During the holiday season, Starbucks Coffee will donate five cents from the purchase of select beverages to help finance AIDS programs in Africa.

A debate about the campaign is playing out on YouTube, proof that promoting a philanthropic endeavor can spur as much discord as selecting a coffee blend.

Oral-B: Power Ads for a Power Toothbrush.

The New York Post's Page Six gossip section, including the Post nameplate, cleaned up with these ads from P&G's Oral-B promoting the Triumph electric toothbrush. In another era, a newspaper's nameplate was sacred territory untouched by ads. But those days are apparently long gone.

Chad White Leaves EEC, Joins Seattle Agency.

Chad White, director of retail insights at the Email Experience Council, has headed to Smith-Harmon, a Seattle-based e-mail marketing agency.

White, author of the Retail Email Blog, will assume the newly created position of research director at Smith-Harmon. The agency's headed up by Lisa Harmon and Aaron Smith.

The agency's clients include Costco, Williams-Sonoma, BabyCenter, and Leapfrog.

White will continue to work out of New York City, where Smith-Harmon has three team members, according to Harmon.

Media6degrees Launches, Fusing Behavioral and Social Marketing.

When someone claims a digital network of 400 "friends," undoubtedly including everyone from middle school girlfriends to office acquaintances, it's not easy to tell who the real buddies are.

With this in mind, the founders of Media6degrees two years ago set out to build an ad platform that could trace an individual's real circle of friends. It did so by engineering a combination of cookies and ad server logs to pinpoint a person's interests and generate anonymous profiles of his or her real friends. The resulting ad network, which entered trial-mode back in May, has now been commercially released.

According to the company, any individual connected to an advertiser's existing customer respond to ads two to thirty times more often than consumers targeted with simple demographic and geographic targeting.

Media6degrees chalks up the propensity of these individuals to buy similar products to the psychographic likenesses that naturally exist between friends. While that may be so, I'm more inclined to credit simple word of mouth. Whatever. If the company's internal research is to be trusted, it would appear Media6degrees offers a compelling fusion of behavioral targeting and social marketing.

As CEO Joe Doran, an ex-Microsoftie, put it to me last spring, "The most important thing is not to look at the content but to look at the interactions between individuals. I'm defined not by my interactions on MySpace or on Facebook. I'm defined by my interactions with my friends."

McCain Online Ad Spending Up to $2.36 M.

The election is over but the Federal Election Commission reporting ain't. I just finished going through additional online media expenditures reported by the McCain campaign. The new estimate is $2.36 million. (I reported last month that the McCain camp spent $1.53 million according to 2008 FEC reports representing expenditures into October.)

As I noted then, McCain’s FEC reports are really cryptic - unlike Obama's which were quite transparent. So, the most I know is John McCain 2008 and McCain-Palin 2008 paid around $2.6 million for "media" to its Web ad consulting firm, Connell Donatelli. (I shaved off around 10 percent to account for fees and other ad charges that didn't go towards actual media buys.) Just to make it even more opaque, the McCain campaign lists the firm as "CD, Inc." But, my understanding of how the campaign operated is that Connell Donatelli, a.k.a. CD, handled the Web media.

Meanwhile, Obama's campaign reported individual expenditures to media firms, so I've been able to decipher much more about where they spent.

There's another wrinkle in that the McCain campaign also created a Victory Fund and a Compliance Fund to circumvent those pesky campaign finance regulations. I haven't seen any payments to CD in reports from those entities yet, though I've been told to look for them.

Virgin Media Joins T-Mobile, Adopts Yahoo Mobile Search Tool.

U.K. mobile network operator Virgin Mobile has partnered with Yahoo to power search functions on its re-launched mobile portal. As of December 8, the portal will take on the branding of its parent company, Virgin Media, and will integrate Yahoo's oneSearch technology.

Yahoo also said today that it plans to deliver mobile sponsored search results and contextually served sponsored listings via the portal early next year, and that it is focusing on, "creating the monetization engine for the mobile Internet."

Despite its troubles, the Internet giant appears to be making decent progress in the mobile search sector, having secured an exclusive deal with T-Mobile in February, representing 11 European Markets. At the time, a Yahoo spokesperson described mobile search as a "key area in the future of Yahoo."

Search results via the Virgin portal will now include photos from Flickr, financial data, integrated information from Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, and downloadable content such as ringtones and mobile games.

Quote of the Day: Michael Wolff on MySpace's Audience.

"…If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people."

-Michael Wolff, author of new Rupert Murdoch biography “The Man Who Owns The News," in an interview with Jon Fine.

Newspaper Web Revenues Drop Again in Q3.

People who report news for a living don't like hearing about other news operations doing poorly. It just doesn't bode well. Until less than a year ago, though, newspapers seemed to have a glimmer of hope through their online businesses.

Not anymore -- at least for the time being.

After its first ever reported drop in online ad revenue in Q2 2008, the industry drifted another few notches in Q3. According to the Newspaper Association of America, online paper sites brought in $749.8 million in Q3, a drop of 3 percent from a year before.

At that time, Internet ad revenue reached $773 million, having risen a healthy 21 percent over Q3 2006.

Overall, combined print and online spending fell 18 percent in Q3 2008 to $8.9 billion.

Jonathan Miller Said to Pursue a Yahoo Stake.

Former AOL chief executive Jonathan Miller is raising money to support a potential bid for Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal has heard from sources. (Update: A conflicting story in the Post says Miller is indeed fund raising, but that the money is for Velocity Interactive rather than Yahoo. More details.)

According to the story:

Mr. Miller has been talking to private equity investors and sovereign wealth funds for months in hopes of raising money for a Yahoo deal, and it is unclear whether the talks have progressed or are just continuing, these people say. Mr. Miller believes he can do a deal that would be worth around $20 to $22 a share to Yahoo shareholders, these people say, which would involve raising about about $28 billion to $30 billion to purchase the entire company.

As WSJ points out, the general palsy in lending activity right now makes such a fund raising job seem like a pipe dream.

New York Post: Miller Not on a Yahoo Hunt After All.

The New York Post has called foul on a Wall Street Journal report claiming Jonathan Miller is scraping together funds for a possible Yahoo bid.

The former AOL chief exec is indeed raising cash, according to the story, but not to acquire Yahoo. Rather the moves are part of his capitalization efforts on behalf of his investment firm, Velocity Interactive. The story adds Miller has entertained a Yahoo investment in the past, but nothing is imminent.