More importantly, Costolo noted that Twitter will launch an advertising model “soon”. He went on to say that soon means most likely early next year. He continued, “It (the advertising) will be fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it.”

The final comment from Costolo noted that partners like TweetDeck will be able to partner in the advertising operation.

It seems like no matter who writes about Twitter and advertising, the concept is merging advertising inside the stream (even if it’s displayed separately) and that the ads should be targeted towards the content of the tweet.

I wonder what happens to the paid advertising programs (like the one Izea runs) once Twitter launches their own.

Janine’s post notes that one of the company’s competitors, iContact, ran an ad in the conference hall during the Dreamforce conference. Just one small issue with the ad…iContact spelled their competitor’s name wrong! If you are going to create ads that hit hard (maybe even considered attack ads) against your competition, you better make sure that the ads are perfectly executed. Otherwise you will end up with pie on your face like iContact has.

Today I noticed that the CityFlitz website is back with the following unfortunate message:

Judging from the length of the line, as shown in the video below, the online advertising industry must be out of the recession and ready for major growth. Either that or there was no plan for how to handle that most conference attendees would want to, you know, actually enter the conference. Now that I think about it and listening to people on the line, it is definitely the latter. There are actually two lines like the one in the video below. As of Noon today, the line appeared to be at least 75 minutes long. Lots of people seemed pissed that they paid anywhere from $35-$1,800 and had to wait for their badge. I assume by this afternoon they will have this registration issue resolved. Let’s hope that the Web 2.0 check-in process will be smoother later this month.

If you decide to watch the video, please note that there is a lot of camera shake.

Nearly every station I’ve been to recently had very clear announcements on the platforms. This is a big change from the announcement systems of the 70s and 80s. There are announcements about security, how long until the next train arrives and a variety of other public service messages.

With all of the talk these days about local and local advertising, this could be a great opportunity for the MTA to launch “platform audio advertising”. I could see two types of ads; a general category that runs across the system and a local category with ads for companies that are within a short distance of the current station.

Now let’s come back to the countdown timers. We know how far a train is from a station and that distance tells us the precise time to play the ads. Naturally we wouldn’t want to play an ad when a train is entering the station. There is plenty of time between trains entering and departing to provide a reasonable amount of ads that don’t overwhelm riders while still providing value to the local community.

A self-service system similar to Google AdWords would work well for this transit audio advertising network. Pick your time, your station(s), etc and place your bid. Other factors would have to be taken into account as well to make sure a variety of businesses were able to get in on the action.

You already have to listen to other people’s music on the subway so why not listen to some brief ads that keep our fares low and might actually provide real local value.

In related transit news, FourSquare and BART announced a partnership today.

As a railfan, it’s so exciting to see the major transit systems across the U.S. starting to embrace technology.

We’ve been unable to access the service for more than 24 hours and from some conversations this morning, it appears that the service has been down for a longer period of time. It seems that even more than a year ago many Spottt publishers were wondering if anyone was still using the service.

Most of the ads we saw running in the Spottt network looked pretty amateur and would probably never run on larger blogs. The interesting thing about the Spottt code is that if you have Javascript, it degrades nicely and nothing is displayed. If you aren’t running Javascript, you always see the same Spottt house ad but clicking takes you to a blank page.

Let’s hope that the doggie is just taking an extended rest.

I’ve used Burst Media in some capacity since the mid-90s. Today I only use them to serve some ads on InsideTransit as the other networks in my chain have performed better in both CPM and fill rate. Last year Burst Media announced several niche ad networks including a niche online gamers ad network. I assume the acquisition of Giant Realm will help to strengthen the Burst ad networks.

Giant Realm raised just over $5 million since early 2008. The company is based in midtown although no information was provided as to whether they will move in with Burst either in NYC or in Mass.

Last month Kara Swisher provided a list of companies she thought might be acquired soon and Giant Realm was one of the names on her list.

Related: check out all of our Burst Media coverage.

The answer is here and it’s from Moon Publicity — you can now advertise on the moon. When you buy an image on the moon, it’s available for a few days each month and apparently will last thousands of years.

Today is also the 40th anniversary of the first man on the moon.

Here’s an overview of the “shadow shaping” robot technology which is used to create the ads. “New Shadow Shaping technology creates images on the moon that can be seen from Earth.  Robots are used to create several small ridges in the lunar dust over large areas that capture shadows and shape them to form logos, domains names or memorials.”

Bids are being accepted for the ad slots starting at $46,000.

From the release, “Finally dependency on government to travel beyond Earth is over,” says inventor David Kent Jones. “This new commercial incentive will turbo charge space technology development. Shadows are just the beginning; eventually robots will be planting crops on other planets.” 

Here’s a short overview video of how the Moon Publicity robot works:

Online advertising marketplace BuySellAds has put together their “3 Golden Rules to Selling More Ads”. They discussing pricing models including eCPM pricing.

Ad placement is the second rule — different locations can mean placement premiums.

The last rule is content – as we know the better your content, the more you can charge.

If you are new to selling your own ads, you might try reducing the price a pinch below what you think is a fair price to check interest levels. Then as you get advertisers buying ads, increase the price little by little until you meet resistance. Also remember that many advertisers will want to negotiate so if you start low, you will wind up going even lower.

Share your pricing tips in the comments and I will add them to the post.

An Amazon judging panel will review all contest submissions and select five finalists based on:

• Creativity
• Overall appeal
• Likelihood of inspiring viewers to shop with Amazon

Amazon notes “suitable to air to a family audience on a national network.” Apparently they will pick finalists and let viewers pick a winner. One winner the Amazon judges picks will win $10k and the user winner will win $10k as well.

This type of “crowdsourced” ad creation seems to be pretty popular these days. For a small prize, Amazon gets press and interested customers – it’s a smart move. The customers who create videos will also pimp them around providing for even more awareness of the contest and Amazon.

Jodi Senese, Executive Vice President, Marketing, CBS Outdoor said, “…if someone is interested in a product or service advertised they can receive a coupon, free merchandise or another offer simply by texting in a short code, giving the company ongoing communication with an interested consumer.”

Mobile technology provider Rip Road will serve the text messaging portion of the advertisement. Campaigns start at $225 for 500 SMS interactions. I’ve always pushed for every offline ad to have some way to get users and/or viewers online. It’s a mistake to run a campaign in a magazine, newspaper or on a billboard without some online call to action.

It will be interesting to see if the CBS billboards in Times Square and around NYC start to feature SMS codes as part of this program.

DAG Ventures led the new Series C round and existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and Jonathan Miller, the company’s board chairman, all participated.

For the OpenX hosted program, the company reports growth of 500% to 7.5 billion monthly impressions. They also note that 10,000 web publishers are using the hosted program.

Interestingly, OpenX shares some bits about their revenue model which is broken up into four parts:

• professional services for publishers
• premium support packages
• premium Hosted packages
• OpenX Market

We’ve seen more news and talk shows starting to introduce products and services directly into the shows. My guess is that the ads inside the shows convert better and are higher priced compared with a 30-second TV spot. It’s also way cheaper to produce the “live ads” than a produced ad spot.

The Mike and Juliet show runs Yahoo Buzz spots each week as regular show segments. Oprah is pimping Skype for cash.

Today I noticed Ellen is now running “live ads” for one of her sponsors – Advil. I’ve embedded the clip below. Is this type of ad more effective than a regular commercial? The audience seems to be eating it up even if they are forced to clap and applaud. Do they realize that it’s a commercial? The best part about these live ads is that they beat the DVR or Tivo.

We are currently seeing a variety of new advertising concepts tested on blogs, social networks and websites. Some are on the level, some ride the line and some are way over the “ethical” line. Whether its paid reviews, “sponsored conversations” or the “give product to a blogger”, we will see more new ideas in the market over the next 12-18 months. I do believe we will see WAY more campaigns which “rent” people who have high follower counts on the various networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.).

Will we see ads like the one below on blogs? We are already seeing the spots in video, will it enter the text world as well?

From the launch announcement, “How does the InSynch Video Takeover work?  While the in–stream video ad is playing, the entire page where the player resides turns into an advertising canvas where anything is possible.  For example, marketers can have objects jump out of the video ad and into a companion banner placement or have these elements fly across the web page, temporarily taking over the page and captivating the viewer’s attention. ”

It looks like a pretty interesting advertising unit as long as the actual synch always works perfectly. Check out the demo of the InSynch ad unit on YuMe’s site.

Scott noted that the 100 paid reviewers of the Ford Fiesta will disclose that they are part of the “movement”. That’s great that there will be disclosure – it’s something that many of the paid reviews systems have moved to. And while I am using Ford as an example, they are by no means alone with regards to my question. Whether it’s Izea, Magpie, in-house ad sales, etc, the question continues to grow in importance. And I haven’t even mentioned pimping by investors, friends, family members, etc.

Disclosure is easy on a blog, but what about as the blog entry is pushed around. Does the disclosure travel with the blog entry? And more importantly, what about all of the social media services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Plurk, etc.? How do we define disclosure on these networks?

Scott says that twitter messages will be tagged with a #tag. But if I am a new/general user of Twitter, how do I know that #tag means that it’s a sponsored message? Magpie sticks #magpie into the Twitter message but the same question applies. What if I want to note my post about the Ford Fiesta on Twitter – if I use the #tag, does it then appear that it’s a sponsored post? What about users who find a Twitter message via a search? What about retweets (that is where another Twitter user shares a message from another user)?

Melanie Notkin was paid by Disney to push out Twitter messages about a new movie release. In her blog post she noted, “Every time I tweet a ’sponsored’ tweet from Disney, I will use #SADisney. That way, you’ll know it.” That works for people who have read her blog post, but what about all of the new followers she gets each day, users searching for Disney or people that don’t read her blog. How do they know that she isn’t just saying she likes the Disney movie and is instead getting paid to push messages to her followers?

Twitter’s not alone – what about photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube. Yesterday I watched a video that was paid for by Intel about Intel. The blog post noted that the video was paid but there was nothing in the actual video regarding the sponsored status. Had they put a note upfront about the paid status inside of the video, that would suffice for the video medium. So viewers on Youtube.com or in an embed have no idea the content was paid.

As more companies expand their efforts to buy users in return for authoritative media impressions and content, this issue of paid social media disclosure will only continue to rise. And companies will increase their spend in this area because it’s cheap and provides a greater return than a traditional banner ad or widget.

The bottom line is that just sticking a hashtag (e.g. #tag) on a twitter message, photo or video isn’t enough to properly disclose a relationship.

Could it be that some companies actually like this usage of paid social media because it looks very authentic and they can claim disclosure that most system users will never realize is actually sponsored or paid? I certainly hope not.

We need to come together to to develop standards around social media disclosure so that we never blur the lines between a person paid for their content and those who are doing it out of true passion or concern. On the other hand, we could just assume everything we read on any of the social media sites is paid.