The decision comes three weeks after Google’s $3.2 billion takeover of online ad service DoubleClick. The sale will enable Google to preserve the trust of its users, according to Tom Phillips, who is overseeing the company’s DoubleClick acquisition.

“It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business,” Phillips wrote in a blog on Google’s Web site. “Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission.” Google doesn’t have a buyer for Performics yet, but several of the company’s business partners already have expressed interest, Phillips wrote.

In other fallout from the DoubleClick deal, Google reportedly is preparing to eliminate about 300 jobs in the biggest purge in the company’s nearly 10-year history. The New York Times reported Google’s layoff plans on its Web site late Wednesday, citing an unnamed person with direct knowledge of the upcoming cuts.

Meanwhile, travel giant Expedia’s shares were up in late-afternoon trading Wednesday amidst rumors that Google was considering acquiring the company. And buzz persists about the search giant’s intentions to gobble up eBay’s beleaguered Internet chat division, Skype.

Representatives from the trio of companies said they don’t comment on rumor or speculation, but that didn’t stop investors or the blogosphere from buying into the ideas.

The Expedia buy would make Google a direct competitor of travel portals like Priceline and Orbitz Worldwide–companies that currently use the giant’s paid-search platform to advertise their own travel deals. And that would generate a costly conflict of interest, according to industry analysts like The Motley Fool’s Rick Aristotle Munarriz. “Sleeping with the enemy is one thing. Paying for its fare and making a rival stronger in the process, is another,” Munarriz wrote.

On the other hand, a Skype acquisition would fit right in with the giant’s voice-based cross-platform communications strategy, which includes the free GOOG-411 directory assistance service, an existing VoIP service with GTalk, as well as GrandCentral, a phone call management service that Google purchased in 2007 for $50 million.

While Skype has not been a financial success for eBay (with roughly $400 million in revenues in 2007–a drop in the bucket for its parent company), the VoIP provider has surged in popularity, boasting that it currently supports some 10 million users simultaneously at any given time.

Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget argues that with the right engineers and financing (a la brains and budget backed by the Googleplex), Skype would be a valuable acquisition: “Once integrated with Gmail, contacts, etc., Skype would give Google the most complete all around communications platform on the web,” Blodget wrote. “Google’s global dominance, meanwhile, would provide an awesome distribution platform for Skype. Sounds like a match made in heaven.”

The speculation increased amidst the noticeable absence of bigwigs from Google’s voice products group–including vice president of product management Salar Kamangar and GrandCentral founders Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet–at Wednesday’s CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas. “That doesn’t mean the team is busy working on a partnership or acquisition of Skype instead of attending the conference,” wrote TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. “But given that we’ve heard from sources close to the deal that something is happening between the companies, it’s not a stretch, either.”

Digitas chose JPG Magazine, a print and online publication geared toward amateur photographers, because the magazine fosters a community that is enthusiastic about taking high-quality pictures–pictures that aren’t typically associated with camera phones. Members submit their pictures for various categories or themes on the site, and the community chooses which ones will be featured in the next print issue.

Since late November, Samsung has been a featured sponsor of several themes on JPGmag.com. Ray reports that the first theme they launched garnered over 1,000 new submissions within the first few days.

Although JPG Magazine doesn’t offer the reach of a photo-sharing site like Flickr, the site’s focus on passionate photographers outranked Flickr’s critical mass.

“Flickr is great, but users can take it as seriously as they want, which means that both the demographics and the image quality run the gamut,” Ray says. “JPG Magazine is for people who like to take great pictures, but it’s not as intimidating as an established brand like Popular Photography.”

The experience extends beyond JPG Magazine. When users click on the Samsung banner, they’re taken to a microsite where they can craft text and picture emails to send to their friends. Dubbed the “Emotion Translator,” the site features images submitted by JPGmag.com members that focus on specific emotions and can be paired with messages.

For example, users can send an “I’m sorry” email, complete with a black-and-white shot of a pensive man at the beach or a broken vase with water, flower petals and stems smashed on the floor.

WPP’s London-based GHI & Partners was the lead agency behind the initial TV and print campaign, an effort that heralded the camera phone’s ability to help consumers “express [their] emotions perfectly” through premium-quality pictures. Fellow WPP shop Mindshare was the agency behind the campaign’s search execution and media placement.

According to Ray, Samsung and Digitas will use multiple metrics for evaluating the online campaign’s effectiveness, including number of emails sent, time spent on the site and return visits. But raising brand preference and purchase intent are the main goals, and those metrics will be measured through research and questionnaires conducted by Dynamic Logic (the research arm of WPP’s Millward Brown).

From May through September, San Francisco-based Goodby’s search and display campaign for the HD DVD North American Promotional Organization included banner ads that ran across some 10 networks (as well as single-site buys on properties like ESPN). The banners directed users to the HD DVD microsite at www.thelookandsoundofperfect.com, where they could find more information about high-definition DVD players, view simulated screen shots, and sign up to receive special offers for HD DVD content.

Average CTRs on Tribal Fusion were four times better than any of the other ad networks on the plan, according to Max Heilbron, senior communications strategist at Goodby. “The click-through rates were freakishly high,” Heilbron said. And Tribal Fusion’s average CTRs were more than double the entire campaign average overall.

Emeryville, Calif.-based Exponential partnered with Dynamic Logic (the research arm of WPP’s Millward Brown) to study the branding effects of those ads, and the stats showed a positive lift among people in terms of awareness and familiarity with the brand. “Not everyone is familiar with HD DVD,” Heilbron said. “It’s a new technology and it sounds like HDTV, so raising awareness and getting people to understand how it compares to DVD or Blu-ray and not HDTV was the primary focus.”

These brand-specific results are not typically associated with ad networks, but according to Alistair Goodman, vice president of strategic marketing for Exponential, it’s par for the course with the company’s newly minted “Brand Certified” service.

“Brand Certified uses the same geo-, psycho, demo and behavioral targeting technology that delivers performance-based results on Tribal Fusion, so it’s no surprise that Goodby saw such excellent CTRs,” Goodman said. “But with the combination of back-end research through partners like Dynamic Logic, and our own audience analytics, we can deliver insights that have nothing to do with clicks.”

Goodman added that ad partners using Brand Certified also utilized this data for everything from message testing, to better identifying their targets–and even discovering new market segments. “You started out targeting 18- to-25-year-olds in urban areas, then you discover that the message is really resonating with 35- to-55-year-olds from the ‘burbs,” Goodman said. “Now you have a new audience to target, and the need to craft a better message to reach your initial demo.”

According to Goodman, the service is part of a growing trend within the ad network space, as the focus shifts from targeting content to truly targeting audiences.

More than 600 mobile phone users were surveyed directly via the TWCI WAP site, equally split between control (or non-exposed) and test groups that had been exposed to ads for Hilton’s Hampton Hotels brand. The questions were slated to gauge the effectiveness of mobile ads for such factors as ad and brand awareness, imagery and purchase intent among a targeted segment of TWCI users.

In terms of demographics, the campaign on TWCI’s mobile network achieved significant penetration into Hampton’s target market–as some 72% of the respondents traveled for business or leisure within the past year. They were also heavy mobile Web users, as nearly two-thirds accessed the Internet via phone more than once daily, while 42% used their mobile to visit weather.com more than once per day.

The campaign showed high effectiveness for brand metrics, as respondents’ overall favorability toward Hampton was higher for the exposed group (62% favorability) than the control group (48%). In addition, exposure to the campaign caused an increase in purchase intent (defined as consideration to stay at a Hampton hotel for their next trip) by at least 10 points.

While the data may be insightful–culling mobile results that are both statistically significant and brand-centric poses some challenges. “That type of brand test is fairly common online, but we had to find a way to implement a similar methodology for mobile that didn’t rely on cookies,” said John Gibb, director of research and insights for The Weather Channel Interactive. “We’ve been working with Dynamic Logic and InsightExpress to develop a methodology we were comfortable with.”

Gibb added that it was important for mobile advertisers, researchers and network providers to use established brand metrics for case studies and reports–even though the medium is showing consistently higher levels of engagement than TV or even the Internet.

“Not to sound too simplistic, but branding is branding. We want to take metrics like intent to purchase, awareness, and affinity and use them on mobile so that there’s an apples to apples comparison with TV, print and the Internet,” said Gibb. “Once you get outside that, it means mobile is speaking its own language and then the engagement numbers and CPMs become harder to digest.”

According to Kara Manatt, research director at Dynamic Logic, the Hampton Hotel mobile case study is one of many that the firm has logged for brands across multiple verticals and consideration categories–driven equally by client demand and the push for more research industry-wide.

“Advertisers are asking us to measure the branding impact of their WAP campaigns because they’re spending real money,” said Manatt. “They need to understand how it’s working, and mobile’s impact on traditional brand metrics.”

Manatt said that moving forward, Dynamic Logic’s continued focus would be to provide data that can normalize aggregated results from multiple studies. “We’ve done quite a few mobile-based studies since the beginning of 2007,” said Manatt. “By the end of the year, we’ll have averages to compare and give benchmarks to some of the deltas we’ve seen.”

This July, the creative division of Microsoft’s aQuantive polled nearly 500 “connected consumers”–or online users over age 20 who had broadband access, visited socially oriented sites like MySpace or YouTube, and spent at least $200 online in the last calendar year.

The agency broke down the users into four age groups, ensured that they were geographically and economically diverse, and then asked them roughly 30 situational questions with the goal of understanding how they really used the tools and features of Web 2.0.

“One of our clients kept using the phrase ‘Web 2.0′ compliant–and we wanted to define what that meant,” said Garrick Schmitt, editor of the report and vice president for user experience, Avenue A|Razorfish. “We do a lot of work on a site-by-site, case-by-case basis, but this is the first study we’ve done to see how consumers use these things in aggregate.”

Not surprisingly, online video scored high, as an overwhelming majority of respondents (95%) had watched a video online within the past three months. Connected consumers watched both TV shows (72%) and movie trailers (85%) online–with some 36% saying that they watched a trailer online before going to the theater “most” or “all of the time.” And nearly half (49%) of respondents added to the online video pool by uploading clips or movies.

The study also found that connected consumers were regular bloggers and blog readers. Some 70% of respondents read blogs on a regular basis, with weekly and daily readers (32% and 29%, respectively), as the top frequencies. Nearly half (46%) of all respondents read four or more blogs regularly, while 41% actually wrote or posted frequently to blogs.

Connected consumers also relied on peer influence for online shopping purposes–with some 55% saying that they relied on user reviews “the most” when it came to purchase decisions. In contrast, just over 20% said the same about expert reviews or product comparison charts.

Personalized recommendations also drove online sales, with 62% of users purchasing a product that a company like Amazon.com suggested based on past purchases. Some 72% of respondents found these recommendations helpful–and two-thirds said that they were not concerned about privacy when it came to receiving them.

Customization of content and interface is key, as some 60% of connected consumers choose to personalize their start pages with “specific content feeds, scheduled updates or other features,” and 56% subscribe to an RSS feed with some regularity. More than a third (35%) of consumers used Google as their start page, with about a quarter (24%) choosing to start at Yahoo, and 10% using either AOL or MSN.

Mobile multimedia usage was the one area that lacked strong penetration–even with connected consumers–as the majority (64%) said they never used their mobile phone to “check weather, news or sports headlines.” Similarly, 76% never used mobile to watch video, 68% said the same for listening to music, and 58% had never used their phone to check email. Some 53% of connected consumers, however, had used their phones to take photos and then share them on the Web.

Safecount most recently served as a data collection arm to Kantar’s Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic, assisting on campaign effectiveness research for brands such as American Express, General Motors and Procter & Gamble. Its services are now being opened up to other companies.

At the new Safecount.net site, consumers can find out how many times they have seen a Safecount-tracked ad, what information the relevant cookies contain, and opt out of Safecount-sponsored survey participation and data collection. Safecount also offers free, phone-based consumer assistance.

A recent study by the Committee for Marketing and Opinion Research found that 80% of Web users are concerned about threats to their personal privacy, particularly the use of cookies.

Safecount’s new service was deemed “an admirable effort to introduce a new level of transparency on cookies to the consumer” by Fran Maier, executive director and president of TRUSTe.

“The cookie viewer on the Safecount Web site should give consumers who are concerned with what is contained in their cookies a new perspective while providing an opt-out mechanism,” added Maier.

In addition, Safecount launched Veranda, a service for publishers that aims to streamline the process of collecting survey-based Web site data and ensure a quality user experience.

“Sometimes publishers can have four or five different companies running live Web recruitment efforts at the same time,” said Tom Kelly, COO, Safecount. “Veranda channels all visitors through one platform, giving publishers a clear view of how many surveys each user is invited to participate in and how it’s impacting the experience overall.”

While providing two free, full-scale services, the bulk of Safecount’s revenues will come from Web campaign effectiveness research projects, including user participation surveys and other methods of live data collection.

The company is currently managing research for mobile ad campaigns, and Kelly noted that advertiser interest in mobile data collection is mounting. “It’s already high,” said Kelly. “We have between five and 15 mobile studies scheduled at any given moment, and four months ago we didn’t have any.”

Safecount also plans to develop new tactics for live data collection for emerging media such as online video, podcasts and streaming radio.

Shareholders questioned Semel’s dedication to his position, both formally and informally. One of the most vocal investors in recent weeks has been Eric Jackson, CEO of Jackson Leadership Systems, Inc., who asked Semel to “acknowledge that the last few years have been unacceptable” with a direct apology. In response, Semel defended the company’s efforts to fulfill its mission statement, and alluded to delivering positive, hard numbers during the Q3 and Q4 earnings meetings.

Another shareholder asked outright whether Semel still has “a fire in his belly for the job.” Although the two bantered back and forth, Semel ultimately affirmed his passion for Yahoo and confidence in the company.

“I feel very good about my capabilities,” said Semel. “I believe in our model. I believe in being diversified.” He mentioned partnerships with Apple to deliver mobile Web service to the iPhone, as well as the success of Flickr, Answers and Yahoo’s recent newspaper advertising deal as examples of the company’s progress.

An earlier jab at Semel’s accountability came in the form of a stockholder-initiated proposal for Yahoo to adopt a “pay for superior performance” standard. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters Pension Fund, which owns 21,900 Yahoo shares, proposed a system that would only allow executives to be awarded an annual bonus “when Yahoo’s performance exceeds its peers’ median or mean performance.” Although it was met with resounding applause from attendees, some 62% of shareholders later voted against the incentive-based program.

Two separate shareholder-initiated proposals raised the issue of Yahoo’s policies toward censorship and human rights in developing markets. The City of New York, which owns millions of shares in various pension funds for teachers, cops and firefighters, proposed that Yahoo use all legal means to resist censors, as well as withhold data that could identify individual users in countries with censorship policies.

A second proposal called for the formation of a committee on human rights that would exist within the Board of Directors. The shareholders specifically brought attention to Yahoo’s “betrayal” of Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison after the company supplied the Chinese government with information on his Internet use.

Although both proposals were defeated, with 71% and 81% against them respectively, co-founder Jerry Yang reiterated the company’s dedication to preserving the rights of Yahoo users in countries abroad. “This is an issue that will not go away for us,” said Yang. “We remain fully committed to protecting human rights both as the challenges and opportunities grow.”

When stockholders asked if Yang and co-founder David Filo would make their interim CTO responsibilities (in Farzad Nazem’s absence) more permanent, Semel extended an open invitation to Yang, who sidestepped gracefully. Semel did say that Yahoo was actively looking for talent to fill the position, both from inside and outside the company.

And what about online, Google’s still-predominant medium?

Speaking at the JMP Securities Research Conference, Rajaram answered investors’ questions about the company’s forward-looking plans with one statement: “Advertisers are increasingly coming to us saying that they want an online advertising solution–not just a search or display solution.”

He then detailed a number of key components in Google’s strategy for providing such a comprehensive solution, and in the process fielded queries about monetizing YouTube and the future of independent ad networks in light of recent deals.

Breaking the various forms of online ad models out of their silos is of primary concern, Rajaram said, and Google intends to leverage YouTube’s scale and popularity in order to do so. He acknowledged that while the video portal has been growing in metrics such as page views, it’s still years away from being a “billion-dollar ad-revenue stream.”

Rajaram alluded to the PVA (participatory video ad) unit as an example of how YouTube drives innovation among advertisers–as brands like Cingular create strong, community-focused content, especially for the platform. By providing advertisers with a “rich, creative platform” in addition to connecting them to publishers for display, search or contextual ads, Google aims to create a synergy that Rajaram called “brand response advertising.”

While offering advertisers an ad model that fosters a deep understanding of ROI for a multi-platform campaign, Google also plans on using DoubleClick to streamline the inventory management process for publishers. Google’s “tight integration with DoubleClick’s ad server gives us the ability to understand the value of all kinds of inventory better,” said Rajaram. Marrying the DART technology with AdSense’s monetization capabilities, for example, would allow Google’s sales team to match a given publisher’s remnant inventory with an advertiser’s need for a cost-effective display ad supplement.

Answering pointed questions about the future of independent ad networks, Rajaram said: “If the ad networks are just playing an arbitrage game, then they will not survive in the long run.” While declining to comment on specific deals other than Google/DoubleClick, he said he believes the independents can survive by adding value to publishers in a sustainable and scalable way.

Google, however, issued this statement:

“We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications.”

With reports from eMarketer predicting in-game advertising to reach almost $2 billion by 2010, Google could feasibly earn a lion’s share of that revenue by offering marketers personality and behavior-based user information.

Privacy advocates like Sue Charman of online campaign Open Rights Group are deeply concerned. “I can understand why they are interested in this, but I would be deeply disturbed by a company holding a psychological profile,” she said.

Advertising companies such as IGA Worldwide collect IP addresses to serve geographically targeted ads in online games, but delete that information immediately after the transmittal. “At IGA Worldwide, we are extremely aware of the privacy issues surrounding user information,” said CEO Justin Townsend. “We are committed to delivering results for our advertisers, but ultimately we must keep the users happy.”

In March, 61% of active residents–which comScore loosely defines as users who downloaded the software and “participated in some Second Life activity”–came from Europe. So while a majority of the in-world brand initiatives have originated from the U.S., the messages are increasingly reaching an audience on the other side of the Atlantic.

But according to emerging media guru and blogger Greg Verdino, the numbers don’t tell advertisers the whole story. “We can’t measure virtual world engagement using traditional marketing metrics like scale and millions of impressions.”

Advertisers need analysis that reveals the depth of in-world interaction to help make decisions about Second Life’s viability as an advertising channel. “We need to measure things like whether users are returning after their first visit, to whether they’re forging friendships and buying in-world products,” said Verdino, “much more than we need to know the numbers of people that are registered.”

Still, as Second Life’s user base continues to grow, global brands such as Coca-Cola are including it as a component of an overall social media strategy. Coke’s Virtual Thirst, program, for example, uses Flickr, YouTube and Del.ici.ous in addition to Second Life as a way of hitting consumers across a number of different touchpoints.

“It’s more than just throwing up a Sim and getting a lot of residents to come. A new marketing paradigm is starting to emerge,” said Verdino. “We just need more industry-level research on how well users are being engaged across all of the channels.”