A friend recently asked the experts at ChasNote what Coke means by “enough for your meal” in these billboards running in California. A tough question to answer, isn’t it? When is 100 ounces really enough? What if your meal is the world’s biggest bag of Doritos?

“[A year ago] a Pew Internet and American Life Project study found that 20% of online adults 45-54 years old (the ‘younger’ Boomers) and 10% of online adults 55-64 (the ‘older’ Boomers) were participating in social networks…. Boomers are, in fact, joining and participating in social networks. Deloitte late last year found that 46% of Boomers maintain at least one social networking profile — up significantly from 2007. “

Full story at MediaPost.

From Global Post:

“Lentz has been on an old media blitz all week, yapping to everyone from the Today Show, to ABC News, to NPR about how it’s safe to drive a Toyota.

“But the Digg Dialogue is different. In essence, Toyota’s U.S. boss is laying himself out before the site’s 40 million rowdy users, any of whom have a chance to ask him — in no uncertain terms and in a most public forum — WTF?

“As of this writing, Digg’s minions have submitted 1,076 questions. They are, naturally, diverse in tone and subject. But they seem to be falling into several important categories….”

It is, in fact, just some fun with advertising — a nod by Electronic Arts to the ASCII art geeks at Digg. Thanks for the kind words, Brent!

UPDATE 8:36pm: The brentcsutoras post was submitted to Digg (here) and was promoted to Digg’s homepage — based on Diggs added by other readers — 7 hours ago. With nearly 1000 Diggs, it’s one of today’s 10 most popular stories on Digg. Well done, EA.

This isn’t new. If I was among your target audience in the late 1970s, you were likely to find me watching the groovy kids on the sitcom What’s Happening. When Dr Pepper ran commercials starring a guy dancing his way across town dressed like the kids on What’s Happening, surrounded by a group of back-up dancers that looked like extras from the show, it got my attention. The commercial was nearly as much fun as the program, only shorter. I didn’t yet have an iPad and I had recently burned out on Atari Pong; the vernacular I spoke most fluently at the time was TV, and that’s the language in which Dr Pepper spoke to me.

Fast forward to today. If your customers get their news from Digg (where I work), they are speaking a vernacular in which yellow boxes next to blue headlines help them discover content they better not miss. The bigger the number in the box, the more they are likely to pay attention — since it’s a content item that has been vetted and recommended by influencers in their community.

Brands that speak to Digg readers in the vernacular of yellow boxes and blue headlines are succeeding with the Digg audience more than advertisers running more traditional banner ads. By an order of magnitude, in fact, if you’re looking at click-through rates.

Earlier this month, Intel took the idea a step further. They used Digg Ads units (Digg-able, bury-able ads between the 2nd and 3rd story on Digg’s homepage) and IAB-sized Content Ads to drive Digg readers to page filled with news stories breaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The page wasn’t a collection of press releases on Intel products, or even a list of editorial stories picked by an Intel employee because it said something nice about Intel. It was a round-up of CES stories that were vetted by the Digg readers themselves. Intel’s sponsorship created something that Digg itself was lacking: One page assembling the most important gadget news from CES for the reader who doesn’t want to be distracted by any other kind of news. (You know who you are.)

And Intel’s campaign took advantage of something else, too. While nearly 40 million people come to Digg each month, they’re not the only ones speaking the Digg vernacular. Readers of most content sites on the web have noticed yellow buttons and invitations to Digg stories right there on the site they’re reading. Like a Briton coming to America and finding out that we too speak her language. So Intel took IAB-shaped Content Ads and ran them on other sites — such as Wired and CNET — that also attract Intel’s customers in a context where those customers would understand that yellow boxes with big numbers in them mean there’s socially-curated content they might want to check out.

According to Intel’s David Veneski:

“The ability to ‘Digg’ something on the Web has become a ubiquitous sign of approval from a content hungry audience throughout the Internet. With our content ads the goal was to team up with Digg to provide genuinely interesting stories coming out of CES across a wide landscape of sites where our customers seek information.

“Recognizing the aggregation of compelling content was brought to you by Intel in a social friendly, audience approved ‘Diggable’ format gave us the ability to add value to our audience’s experience rather than just paying for an impression that may or may not be of benefit to them.”

Advertising that seeks to improve the audience experience? I like it. And I’m betting website audiences will too.

(Credits: Dave Veneski at Intel; David Zamorski, Sarah Reed and Melissa Sabo at OMD; and Elyssa Wilpon, Erin Coull, Dav Zimak, Eric Hoppe, Dan Contento and Mac Delaney at Digg.)

I love this one for Lego: It’s an on-building billboard that creates a sense of depth, which — to my eyes — makes the building (and my life??) feel less complete without a few more Legos.

Other on-building ads are just bigger, like this one for GTA. Meh. In those cases, I don’t know how much extra value the advertiser, not to mention the passer-by, gets from the gigantic custom work.

(Thanks, Nippy!)

Three months after the Dolan family (owners of Cablevision) bought Newsday for $650 million and put the website behind a paid subscription wall, only 35 people have coughed up the $5 per week fee.

Subscribers to the print edition and to Cablevision’s Optimim Cable package can read the site for free, which, as one Newsday reporter put it (via The NY Observer), makes Newsday.com “the freebie newsletter that comes with your HBO.”

Two observations:

One: While it might suggest that publishers can slow the abandonment rate among print subscribers by giving those subscribers more value for the buck (generally a good business practice!), it’s another data point in the argument that paid online news models (NYT, for example) will struggle.

Two: The above model is broken. If news audiences are migrating to digital formats, publishers that — come on, let’s be honest — erect a pay wall around the digital product as a ploy to save print (or cable) subscribers are eating their own children. It’s a tactic to buy more time to figure out digital. But while traditional print publishers are “buying more time,” their competitors (especially the native digital publishers) will win the game. In other words, buying time before you have to deal with your digital strategy is the opposite of what publishers should be doing.

Back in November, the NY Times reported that Apple filed a patent for un-skip-able ads for iPhones and iPods. Speculation at the time by ChasNote reader RolfSF:

“methinks this is geared more toward some of the ad-supported software models, perhaps giving some ‘free’ iphone apps a means to be free for a price.”

RolfSF was listening in on Apple’s earnings call earlier today and heard something that confirms his speculation: Peter Oppenheimer said the company had acquired Quattro to “offer developers a seamless way to make more money” in their apps, particularly free apps.

You have to wonder if Apple plans to staff an ad sales team.

And — voila! — all your friends will know you use only the finest skin-care products because they’ll see the Chanel logo that’s temporarily embossed on your forehead.

From NOTCOT:

“It did get me thinking about the future of branding and technology. Imagine if the lotion itself had the ability to create those branded impressions. Or if the samples created a brand on your cheek… unlocking the full version gave you the full experience brand free? Much like software? Or what if tattoos came in creme form? Or imagine if you are what you eat, and small symbols appeared on the skin of your wrist showing what you are made of — fun motivation to get some eating healthier?”

Creme tattoos? Certainly a much better idea than Ray Bans tattooed around your eyes or the Golden Palace Casino logo on your forehead.

“Search engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier has upped its estimates for search ad spending this year. The company now expects spending to increase between 15 and 20 percent, up from its earlier estimates of 10 to 15 percent growth, in part due to the economic recovery. By contrast, Efficient Frontier says search ad spending increased six percent in 2009.”

In Q4 2009 Google added to its enormous market-share lead:

“That was a shift from previous reports, which had indicated that Google was losing ground to Bing. Efficient Frontier says Google’s share of overall search ad spending increased to 74.5 percent from 73.9 percent during the previous quarter. Bing’s share, meanwhile, shrunk to 5.1 percent from 5.3 percent.”