If you pulled your hair out over Skype requiring a paid account for group chats, than you’ll simply love this news: the VoIP company announced that they will be bringing advertising to their service. Starting this week, ads will appear on the home-tab for windows users. No word yet as to other operating systems, though they are sure to follow in short order.

Thankfully, the Skype developers are well aware that this has the potential to blow up in their faces. They promise that the ads will be useful, unobstrusive, and apparently also infrequent. From their blog:

You may only see ads occasionally. Our initial plan is to show an ad from one brand per day in each of the markets where advertising is being sold.

And although the ads may involve an exchange of “non-personally identifiable demographic data,” they are providing tools to let you opt out of such exchanges.

After years of ad-free, unlimited use from Skype, it’s very hard not to scowl at the recent changes. But to stay relevant, Skype will need money. Hopefully they’ll continue to keep their focus on providing the service so many users have become reliant on, while working towards profitability.

(via Geek.com, Skype)

For people looking to get a slice of the Facebook pie by advertising on the popular social networking platform, Google’s AdSense has been a major workhorse. AdSense provided users the means to post their ads, with Google taking a cut off the top. However, Facebook recently changed its policies regarding advertising providers, and AdSense appears to no longer be among those cleared to operate on the entire Facebook.

There is no word as to why AdSense is not on the approved list, only that it will no longer be operating with Facebook. In the past, Google has often cited AdSense as a vital asset producing most of its revenue. It’s possible that Google found some aspect of Facebook’s new policy unacceptable, and opted not to be involved.

The change has started rumblings on Facebook’s forum, with many former AdSense users upset about the change. Many are concerned that the approved companies have bad track records, or are too young and small to handle the advertising needs of users. Facebook’s representatives are quick to point out that new providers can be added to the approved list at any time, opening the door to AdSense in the future. But for now, the message is clear: if you’ve been using AdSense for Facebook ads, it’s time to find someone else.

(via Geek.com)

New Zealand clothing store Suprette had this great advertising idea: “Make benches uncomfortable by putting metal plates in the shape of our ad on them, which will then press the ad onto people’s skin if their legs aren’t covered up.” The above picture shows the fruit of that labor. The wacky ad agency behind the campaign explains it a little further:

We put indented plates on bus stop, mall, and park benches, so that when people sat down, the message was imprinted on their thighs. This meant that as well as having branded seats, a veritable army of free media was created, with thousands of imprints being created and lasting up to an hour.

There’s a bit of skepticism regarding the legitimacy of the campaign, as most people will realize two things: One; a perfect storm of having to sit in the exact spot in a fairly precise position, wearing clothing short enough, and having to press one’s legs hard enough against the metal plate without declaring it uncomfortable and moving away from it is required to leave the leg imprints, and two; many people probably won’t be too happy with people staring at the back of their legs for the length of the ad’s lasting power. But hey, short shorts are on sale.

(The Presurfer via Neatorama)

It’s being widely reported across these great interwebs that Taco Bell’s beef is not what it seems. People are shocked, shocked to discover that the tacos they’d paid less than a dollar for and been heartily scarfing down for nearly half a century fall a little short of what you would normally call “beef.” It seems that “Taco Meat Filling,” as Taco Bell calls it, is actually 36% meat. But is that really all that surprising?

The recent news centers around an Alabama lawsuit filed against Taco Bell. The suit accuses the Tex-Mex giant of false advertising since, according the plaintiffs, the substance Taco Bell calls “beef” does not meat meet the defintion of “beef” or “meat taco filling” as defined by the USDA. But let’s all remember that we’re dealing with the same organization that once tried to define ketchup as a vegetable. Moreover, the USDA’s definition of “meat taco filling” is 40% meat, leaving Taco Bell’s concoction only 4% below, as reported by Gizmodo. Folks, that’s not much of a difference.

While that legal battle moves forward, much attention has been paid the actual ingredients of Taco Bell’s “Taco Meat Filling,” which follows below.

Chilean add agency DDB prepared and utilized this dastardly box to seriously freak out apartment dwellers in Santiago, all in the name of ADT, the home security firm. To quote their video:

To prove residents that anyone could break into their homes unexpectedly.

What could possibly go wrong?

Twitter developers beware. TweetUp, which has been hailed as the “Adsense for Twitter,” was announced today at TechCrunch‘s Disrupt event. TweetUp is an ad platform that would give its advertisers access to analytics, an algorithm designed to rank keyword searches in a promotions-friendly manner, and, most tantalizing, a 50/50 revenue split. Basically, individuals and businesses could pay to promote their tweets to the top of any search with a relevant keyword in it, chronological order be damned.

But on the same day as the TweetUp announcement came today’s post on the Twitter blog, wherein Dick Costolo, Twitter COO, plays the part of the valiant knight defending Twitter’s integrity against those pesky third parties. In said post, he writes, “aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.”

This all comes shortly after the announcement of Promoted Tweets – tweets paid for by advertisers including Best Buy, Red Bull, and Starbucks that show up at the top of searches. Everyone wants to make money off Twitter. Even Twitter! But now, apparently, only Twitter actually can.

If you spend much time on the internet, you’ve probably seen them. The ads for the free-t0-play strategy MMO Evony that, instead of featuring, you know, gameplay or review quotes, feature boobs. And more boobs. I know I’m not the only one who first assumed that it was some kind of fantasy themed sex game, porn site, or social network.

Well, Evony has apparently volunteered to clean up its own act. In a statement to Gamasutra, they said:

Moving forward – based on community feedback as well as an in-depth look at advertising effectiveness – we are employing an ad campaign that focuses on the gameplay and features of Evony: Age II.

Read on...

We’ve heard of funny 404 error page Easter Eggs before, but … sponsored 404 pages? Strange. Apparently, that is the direction that Digg is headed, with an ad for Burger King set to appear on the error page that users hit when they type in a query with no results, BrandFreak reports. The ads, which were briefly up last week, are slated to reappear within the week. (The above picture is not an actual ad, but rather an artist’s rend.) The ads will be promoting Burger King’s “Tiny Hands” campaign, about a man with freakishly tiny hands who is sad because he cannot grasp a Burger King® Double Cheeseburger.

WalletPop grabbed the text of one such ad, which will be accompanied by a hypertext link to a “Tiny Hands” BK ad:

The error page is reported to say, “No results for ‘Your Search Error’ were found. Looks like your search had a typo. Blame it on your tiny hands. The beefy $1 Burger King Double Cheeseburger gives tiny hands some trouble, too.”

We’re conflicted:

There may be a “99.9 per cent” chance that Google is going to shut down its Chinese engine Google.cn, as we learned this weekend, and that presents its advertising partners with a tricky choice: Stick with the company with whom they’ve enjoyed past success and risk bannination in the Chinese market, or defect to Chinese search engines at the cost of familiarity — and freedom from censorship.

Now, according to the New York Times, the Chinese authorities have put their thumbs on the scale: They’ve warned Google’s partners that to play ball in China, they’re going to need to censor their search results, with or without Google.

The Future of Privacy Forum, an advertising trade group, has come up with an answer to those that have been calling for regulation of targeted online advertising: a lowercase “i,” curled up in its own tail, in the manner of another familiar Internet related punctuation mark. The graphic is projected to be in use by the end of this summer.

Both Congress and the FTC have expressed concerns about the level of secrecy or obfuscation surrounding target online advertising tactics, where the user’s browser history and “demographic profile” are used to generate a more personally targeted add. Advertisers are understandably worried that regulatory legislation would not move as fast as technological changes, and you know what that means: focus groups!