[UPDATE: Facebook says Ad Age had it wrong and Make-My-Baby.com wasn't a Facebook advertiser at all.]

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb has a post this morning that left me with a chilling sense of deja vu. It’s about a Facebook advertiser named Make-My-Baby.com–according to an Advertising Age story, Facebook’s third-largest advertiser–which has a silly little site that lets you dress up a baby. The site requires you to install a browser plug-in; the plug-in changes your home page and search engine to Bing. From then on, Microsoft gives the Make-My-Baby people a bounty when you click on a search ad in Bing. (Kirkpatrick is reporting on discoveries made by Google’s Matt Cutts.)

It’s all eerily reminiscent of ugly practices of the early-to-mid-2000s in which advertising companies and their partners used a number of practices to install software that pelted PC users with pop-ups and otherwise fouled up their computers. Here’s a 2005 story we did at PC World on the topic.

For the most part, the companies involved in the earlier round of cheesy PC invasions got what was coming to them. The PCW story discusses DirectRevenue, 180Solutions, and WhenU; the first two companies are out of business, and WhenU’s site now leads to information on how to uninstall its software. I wonder how Facebook and Bing will handle the news of this business partner’s behavior?

That’s one big QR code, all right.

Microsoft not only has a new slogan (“Be what’s next.”–an infinite improvement over the insufferable “Your potential. Our passion.”) but has improved the posture of its logo (which dates back to what, the early 90s?).

T-Mobile runs mean (if funny) anti-AT&T ad, decides its souped-up 3G network is a 4G network after all.

If you’ve ever stared helplessly into the hazy, jumbled letters of a Captcha, the Wall Street Journal relays some disturbing news: a start up called Solve Media plans to turn these Internet nuisances into advertisements.

Instead of the usual nonsense in the Captcha box, companies will pay to show a message that the user must re-type. For instance, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 ad requires users to type a slogan, “Browse Safer.” Toyota’s ad will will require typing the amount of money the company spends on safety, “a million dollars an hour.” The idea is that if you repeat the message, you’re more likely to remember it — more so than banner ads, which are easily ignored.

Continue reading this story…

Back in May, we told you about some industrial films that IBM commissioned from the Muppets in the 1960s. The decade before that, the office-equipment giant was a major advertiser in glossy mass-circulation magazines such as LIFE. Today, those ads are a fascinating, evocative trip back to a world in which technology, work, and workplaces were radically different. Yes, there was a time when the typical piece of business correspondence was a snail-mail letter typed by a secretary on a typewriter which might or might not have been electric–and which had no provision for correcting errors.

View The Golden Age of IBM Advertising slideshow.

Good, creepy reporting at the Wall Street Journal by Julia Angwin on how marketers use cookies to create detailed profiles of who you are based on your surfing habits. (I don’t think the standard defense–”none of the information is personally identifiable”–settles the matter. Unless you think it would be acceptable in the real world to spy on someone as long as you didn’t know his or her name.)

Perhaps the amount of negative publicity surrounding the iPhone 4 has forced Apple to go for the sentimental in its latest crop of ads for the device, or perhaps it’s just coincidence. Either way, FaceTime is given top billing and it seems as if the company is serious about video calling.

Four ads have been released: “Smile,” a father reassuring his teenage daughter that the braces she just got aren’t that bad; “Meet Her,” a grandfather seeing his new grandchild for the first time; “Big News,” a wife telling her husband that she’s finally pregnant; and “Haircut,” a boyfriend telling her girlfriend that even though her hair is really short its still “cute.”

There’s no announcer voice, just the interaction. It lets the feature speak for itself, which I think probably does a lot more to convince the viewer that this is something you want rather than some voice telling you this is what you need.

Some have said these ads are a little too personal; I would have to disagree. In a time where advertisers seem to rely too much on humor, having somebody market something on a level like this seems refreshing to me.

We have all four ads here for you to view after the break. I’d like to hear what you think.

Continue reading this story…

Back in August, I blogged about an article that predicted that all Web browsers would eventually block all ads by default. I ended with a poll in which a plurality of  respondents said that sounded like a swell idea.

Ten months later, no browser has introduced sweeping ad-blocking. But on Monday, Apple introduced Safari 5, a new version of its browser with a feature called Reader. It’s not an ad blocker per se, but it does remove ads as part of what it does. And it’s the first significant development in built-in ad, um, discouragers since pop-up blockers became standard equipment years ago.

Like Readability and Instapaper, it examines a Web page with an article on it, strips out navigational elements, Flash modules, and other items other than  the story itself, then displays the text and images in a streamlined view that looks a bit like a word-processing document. When an article is broken into multiple pages, it’s also smart enough to stitch all the pages together without making you click on anything.

Continue reading this story…

IBM. The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight, the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films designed to help its sales staff. Little known today, these remain fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent. Henson would return to their gags and situations in his famous later works–and he plucked the Cookie Monster from one of them when assembling the Muppet cast for Sesame Street in 1969.

Whose idea was this unique collaboration? Well, Henson had already established himself in the advertising field. He was best known at the time for the Muppets’ guest skits on variety shows and Rowlf the Dog’s appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show. But he was busier making a wide array of commercials and longer sales films for regional and national products from Esskay Meats to Marathon Gasoline.

For its own part, IBM was keenly aware that its products–including computers, electric typewriters, and very early word processors–had to be explained to both the public and IBM’s own employees. So it formed its own advertising group, including a film and television division. An executive named David Lazer headed this division, overseeing the production of training and sales films.

Continue reading this story…

For what seems like eons, people have been asking Twitter how and when it’s going to start making money, and the company’s executives have always said that they’ll move to monetize the site only when they can do it right. Today, Twitter is announcing its first big money-making idea. It’s a form of advertising called Promoted Tweets, and it’s no big whoop–basically, brands with presences on Twitter will be able to pay to put (clearly-labeled) tweets about their products at the top of search results. I can’t imagine anyone but the most adphobic among us hating the idea, but it also seems unlikely that Promoted Tweets alone will pay to keep Twitter free forever. They’re clearly a first step rather than the final answer.

Twitter will talk more about Promoted Tweets–and the future of Twitter in general–tomorrow at Chirp, the first official Twitter conference. I’ll be there, and will let you know what we learn…

Remember the Microsoft ads from 2008 which starred Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld? They attracted lots of bemused attention at the time, since they were full of absurdist humor and had so very little to do with Microsoft products. Now TechFlash’s Todd Bishop has unexpectedly revived the discussion by asking Microsoft honcho David Webster to explain what was going on. Webster basically says that the company was planning a lot of new advertising but was worried that nobody would pay attention, so it decided to kick things off with some ads that were impossible to ignore. And he says that the rumors that the campaign was cut short were false.

Continue reading this story…

Over at Ars Technica, founder Ken Fisher has an interesting post on ad blockers and a devilish experiment that Ars performed on Friday: For twelve hours, it blocked back, preventing users of ad-blocking software from seeing any content. Fisher says the counterstrike was a mixed success at best. But he also says that forty percent of Ars visitors block ads, and that doing so can be “devastating to the sites you love.”

As I’ve said before, Technologizer doesn’t need everybody to see the ads here–just a critical mass of folks. I don’t have a reliable way to measure how many visitors use an ad blocker, but here’s a guesstimate: In February, roughly fifteen percent of all Technologizer page views had the ads blocked. I might be more alarmed if the numbers looked more like Ars’, but we have that critical mass of people who don’t block ads. And I’m sure that some of the visitors who block are leaving worthwhile comments, telling their friends about Technologizer, or otherwise doing things that make this a better site and a better business proposition.

Or to put it another way: Ad blocking isn’t devastating Technologizer.

In the Ars post, Fisher says that he takes pride in the fact that his site’s ads aren’t in-your-face crud. Which led me to realize that although Technologizer has a number of guiding principles about the advertising we carry, I’ve never outlined them here.

Continue reading this story…

Last month, I wrote about mysterious Facebook ads that offered free iPads to 45-year-old males. Or 26-year-old females. Or people of whatever age and gender happened to be those of the Facebook member reading the ad.

Now the New York Times has weighed in, with an entertaining and illuminating article on weird Facebook ads (including ones claiming to be aimed at Eddie Izzard fans). It says that Facebook doesn’t approve ads individually, but that ones that mention factors that really have nothing to do with the subject of the ad–such as age, sex, and feelings about Eddie Izzard in the case of a “free iPad” ad–are prohibited and will be deleted when they’re found.

Looks like Twitter may get ads soon, and may talk about it at next month’s South by Southwest conference.