I love the latest coke ads, I really thought they captured the spirit of summer. Now they are launching a year long social media campaign, which looks inspired.

Coca-Cola is sending three young people around the World, visiting 206 countries where the product is sold, to discover what makes the world happy. In what may prove to be an inspired social media campaign, the secret of happiness will be shared with the entire world through social media sites Facebook, YouTube, Twitte and Flickr.

Adam Brown, director of digital communications at Coka Cola has described the campaign as a year-long reality tv series without the tv. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this pans out.

Advertising Agency

Internet ad spend has finally overtaken television advertising in the first half of 2009, a report from the IAB & PWC reveals. The advertising report, based on figures from the Advertising Association and WARC shows that Internet advertising is the only advertising sector to grow in the first half of 2009, reaching the grand sum of £1.75bn ad spend.

The next big question for me is – when will mobile device advertising outstrip pc’s? At AdStorm we are seeing significant growth rates in mobile device traffic to all the websites we manage – which will presumably be reflected in future advertising trends.

The half year's 4.6% growth includes PPC advertising, Banner Advertising and Online Classifieds all grouped together but sits against the backdrop of an overall 17% reduction in advertising spend.

According to Guy Phillipson, CE of the IAB, the recent recession has caused advertisers to seek out the certainty provided by Internet advertising, which is more measurable - causing the Internet to overtake TV ad spend 6 months earlier than expected.

The greater measurability of Internet advertising, individual targeting, and greater divisibility of ad impressions naturally makes it more accessible to small advertisers than other advertising media. Consequently, the more targeted conventional ad types were hit hardest with print media - including classified ads, directories and display ads suffering falls between 20% and 35% since the previous period.

But it's not all one way traffic.  These figures also conceal the fact that print advertising is still the largest sector with 29% of the total ad spend. Classified and display advertising are counted separately in these figures – unlike online, where classified advertising and display advertising are all added together.

Yahoo! today announced a worldwide advertising campaign to coincide with the launch of its new home page. According to Elisa Steele, Yahoo!’s chief marketing officer, Yahoo! hopes to be where an individual’s world meets the larger World.

In theory Yahoo! is the most popular website in The World, but this does not seem to be reflected on the ground in the UK - where I don't think I know of anybody who actually uses Yahoo!  At AdStorm Advertising Agency We manage Pay Per Click Advertising on Google, Yahoo! and Facebook among others and the volume of traffic available – and, in our judgement the quality – is way lower on Yahoo! than on Google. The only saving grace is that the volume of traffic is so low that many advertisers overlook Yahoo! altogether, reducing the competition for keywords thereby providing some good value for money.

In a key aspect of Yahoo!'s new website, it has opened up its home page to rivals such as Facebook and Hotmail – which is surely an admission that these third party social media solutions are in greater demand than its own. This may yet bring a strategic advantage over Google, which only lets users customize their iGoogle home page but doesn’t provide any external links on the core home page - unless of course keywords or phrases are entered and searched for, in which case organic search results and online advertisements are shown.

Yahoo!’s apparent prior vision - that of providing an all-encompassing range of interactive content has surely now been superceded by rivals Google and Facebook, Twitter and a range of emerging sites. Yahoo seems to be repositioning itself as a portal from where "best of breed" soultions can be accessed.