Business Week magazine publishes an annual “brand scorecard” of the top 100 most valuable brands worldwide. Some results from the 2005 survey, which contained 53 American, 37 European, 7 Japanese, and 3 South Korean brands, are listed below.

The European breakdown is as follows: 9 German, 8 French, 5 Swiss, 4.5 British, 4 Italian, 3.5 Dutch, 1 Finnish, 1 Spanish, and 1 Swedish

United States Of America

American Express (credit card)
Apple (computer)
Citi (banking)
Coca-Cola (soft drink)
Disney (entertainment)
Ford Motor Company (automobiles)
GE (household appliances)
Global Gillette (shaving accessories)
Google (internet)
Harley Davidson (motorcycles)
Heinz (food)
IBM (computer)
Intel (computer)
KFC (fast food restaurant)
Levi’s (clothing retailer)
Marlboro (tobacco)
McDonald’s (fast food restaurant)
Microsoft (software)
Nike (footwear)
Pepsi (soft drink)
Starbucks (coffee)

Europe

BMW (automobile—Germany)
Volkswagen (automobile—Germany)
Mercedes-Benz (automobile—Germany)
UBS (banking—Switzerland)
HSBC (banking—UK)
Philips (electronics—Netherlands)
Nestlé (food—Switzerland)
Alessi (Home Accessories—Italy)
IKEA (furniture—Sweden)
Louis Vuitton (leather goods and luxury apparel—France)
Chanel (luxury apparel—France)
Gucci (luxury apparel—Italy)
Nokia (mobile phones—Finland)
BP (petrol—UK)
SAP (software—Germany)
Diesel (Apparel—Italy)
Giorgio Armani (luxury apparel—Italy)
Barilla (food—Italy)

Japan

Canon (photography)
Honda (automobiles)
Nintendo (video games)
Nissan (automobiles)
Sony (electronics)
Toyota (automobiles)

South Korea

Hyundai (automobiles)
LG (electronics)
Samsung (electronics and mobile phones)

A few examples of common spyware programs may serve to illustrate the diversity of behaviors found in these attacks.

• Caveat: As with computer viruses, researchers give names to spyware programs which frequently do not relate to any names that the spyware-writers use. Researchers may group programs into “families” based not on shared program code, but on common behaviors, or by “following the money” or apparent financial or business connections. For instance, a number of the spyware programs distributed by Claria are collectively known as “Gator”. Likewise, programs which are frequently installed together may be described as parts of the same spyware package, even if they function separately.
• CoolWebSearch, a group of programs, installs through the exploitation of Internet Explorer vulnerabilities. The programs direct traffic to advertisements on Web sites including coolwebsearch.com. To this end, they display pop-up ads, rewrite search engine results, and alter the infected computer’s hosts file to direct DNS lookups to these sites. ^[1]

• Internet Optimizer, also known as DyFuCa, redirects Internet Explorer error pages to advertising. When users follow a broken link or enter an erroneous URL, they see a page of advertisements. However, because password-protected Web sites (HTTP Basic authentication) use the same mechanism as HTTP errors, Internet Optimizer makes it impossible for the user to access password-protected sites. ^[1]

• 180 Solutions transmits extensive information to advertisers about the Web sites which users visit. It also alters HTTP requests for affiliate advertisements linked from a Web site, so that the advertisements make unearned profit for the 180 Solutions company. It opens pop-up ads that cover over the Web sites of competing companies. [5]

• HuntBar, aka WinTools or Adware.Websearch, is a small family of spyware programs distributed by Traffic Syndicate. ^[1] It is installed by ActiveX drive-by download at affiliate Web sites, or by advertisements displayed by other spyware programs—an example of how spyware can install more spyware. These programs add toolbars to Internet Explorer, track Web browsing behavior, redirect affiliate references, and display advertisements.

References

1. ↑ ^{a b c} “Parasite information database“. Doxdesk.com. Retrieved July 10, 2005.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The term “spamming” is also used in the older sense of something repetitious and disruptive by players of various video games, most often first-person shooters or fighting games. For shooters, it refers to “area denial” tactics—repeatedly firing rockets or other explosive shells into an area—or to any tactic whereby a large volume of ammunition is expended in the hope of either scoring chance hits, covering teammates’ advance with suppressive fire, or clearing or defending an area from an enemy presence. In fighting games, spamming most often refers to overuse of particularly powerful moves, especially if they are easy to execute.

Whether such tactics are viewed as cheating or abusive varies from game to game, community to community. Analogous to camping, the tactical advantage gained by those thus engaged is the crux of the issue. If every player defensively “spams”, and no one makes the offensive push, there will be no opportunities for players to come into conflict, and thus there will be no game. Games like Capture the Flag help to break this deadlock by providing incentive to invade enemy territory, however risky.

Conversely, the same term may be used to describe those who flood the in-game chat with needlessly profuse and/or frequent messaging, similar to messaging spam mentioned above. Although perceptions vary within the gaming community, in most arenas excessive messaging is unwelcome. On the other hand, in the role-playing games MUD, MUSH, and MUCK, players happily continue using the word in this original sense, with no implication of abuse. When a player returns to the terminal after a brief break to find his or her screen wonderfully filled with pages of random chat, it’s still called “spam”. [13]

SPAM could also be taken to mean a set of humorous English backronyms, including: Short/Stupid/Silly Particularly/Pointless Annoying Messages, Self-Promotional Advertising Material, Self Propelled Automatic Mail, Send Post All Members, Sending Persistently Annoying Mail, and Shit Posing As Mail.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

In the simplest case, relevance can be calculated by examining how many times a query term appears in a document (term frequency), possibly combined with how discriminative that query term is across the searched collection (often called Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency).

Since search engines and other businesses rely upon the accuracy of their results, many additional, more complex algorithms have been developed to estimate result relevance. Many of these algorithms, particularly those used by search engines, are hidden to the public, as a user that knows the details of a search algorithm can artificially boost his own content’s ranking.

Relevance calculation is often misinterpreted by the press. For example, it has often been said that when Google burst onto the scene it was miles ahead of its competitors because it, unlike anyone else, ranked web pages by relevance. This is not true since everyone ranks by relevance. It is just that Google had come up with a fairly new way of estimating relevance, namely PageRank. But even search engines that only use TFIDF rank by relevance.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

With the dawn of the Internet have come many new advertising opportunities. Popup, Flash, banner, and email advertisements (the last often being a form of spam) abound. Recently, the advertising community has attempted to make the adverts themselves desirable to the public. In one example, Cadillac chose to advertise in the movie ‘The Matrix Reloaded’, which as a result contained many scenes in which Cadillac cars were used. Similarly, product placement for Rolex watches and BMW cars featured in recent James Bond films.

Each year, greater sums are paid to obtain a commercial spot during the Super Bowl. Companies attempt to make these commercials sufficiently entertaining that members of the public will actually want to watch them.

Particularly since the rise of “entertaining” advertising, some people may like an advert enough that they wish to watch it later or show a friend. In general, the advertising community has not yet made this easy, although some have used the Internet to widely distribute their adverts to anyone wishing to see or hear them.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

AdSense is an advertising program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text and image advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis. Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user’s geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google’s targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website.

It currently uses JavaScript code to incorporate the advertisements into a participating site. If it is included on a site which has not yet been crawled by the Mediabot, it will temporarily display advertisements for charitable causes known as public service announcements (PSAs). (Note that the Mediabot is a separate crawler from the Googlebot that maintains Google’s search index.)

Many sites use AdSense to monetize their content and some webmasters work hard to maximize their own AdSense income. They do this in three ways:

1. They use a wide range of traffic generating techniques including but not limited to online advertising.
2. They build valuable content on their sites; content which attracts AdSense ads and which pay out the most when they get clicked.
3. They use copy on their websites that encourage clicks on Ads. Note that Google prohibits people from using phrases like “Click on my AdSense ads” to increase click rates. Phrases accepted are “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements”.

The source of all AdSense income is the AdWords program which in turn has a complex pricing model based on a Vickrey second price auction, in that it commands an advertiser to submit a sealed bid (not observable by competitors). Additionally, for any given click received, advertisers only pay one bid increment above the second-highest bid.

Links

• Google AdSense
• Google wants to dominate Madison avenue, too (The New York Times, 2005)
• AdSense patent application

Brands in the field of marketing originated in the 19th century with the advent of packaged goods. Industrialization moved the production of many household items, such as soap, from local communities to centralized factories. When shipping their items, the factories would literally brand their logo or insignia on the barrels used, which is where the term comes from.

These factories, generating mass-produced goods, needed to sell their products to a wider market, to a customer base familiar only with local goods. It quickly became apparent that a generic package of soap had difficulty competing with familiar, local products. The packaged goods manufacturers needed to convince the market that the public could place just as much trust in the non-local product.

Around 1900, James Walter Thompson published a house ad explaining trademark advertising. This was an early commercial explanation of what we now know as branding.

Many brands of that era, such as Uncle Ben’s rice and Kellogg’s breakfast cereal furnish illustrations of the problem. The manufacturers wanted their products to appear and feel as familiar as the local farmers’ produce. From there, with the help of advertising, manufacturers quickly learned to associate other kinds of brand values, such as youthfulness, fun or luxury, with their products. This kickstarted the practice we now know as branding.

Modern branding practices are studied and analyzed at research institutes such as the Zyman Institute of Brand Science at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Anti-spyware programs often report Web advertisers’ HTTP cookies as spyware. Web sites (including advertisers) set cookies — small pieces of data rather than software—to track Web-browsing activity: for instance to maintain a “shopping cart” for an online store or to maintain consistent user settings on a search engine.

Only the Web site that sets a cookie can access it. In the case of cookies associated with advertisements, the user generally does not intend to visit the Web site which sets the cookies, but gets redirected to a cookie-setting third-party site referenced by a banner ad image. Some Web browsers and privacy tools offer to reject cookies from sites other than the one that the user requested.

Advertisers use cookies to track people’s browsing among various sites carrying ads from the same firm and thus to build up a marketing profile of the person or family using the computer. For this reason many users object to such cookies, and anti-spyware programs offer to remove them.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where everything on the menu includes SPAM luncheon meat. As the server recites the SPAM-filled menu, presently a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all normal conversation with a song, repeating “SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM” and singing “lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM” over and over again, stopping all conversation, hence SPAMming the dialogue. The excessive amount of SPAM in the sketch comes from British rationing in World War II. SPAM was one of the few foods that was not restricted and widely available, so by the time of the sketch, the British were fed up with the luncheon meat. Another similarity is that everything on the menu comes with SPAM, therefore representing that you can’t order something without receiving something you don’t want, much like one can’t be active on the Internet and never have spam sent to your e-mail address(es).

Although the first known instance of unsolicited commercial e-mail occurred in 1978 (unsolicited electronic messaging had already taken place over other media, with the first recorded instance being via telegram on September 13, 1904), the term “spam” for this practice had not yet been applied. In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat “SPAM” a huge number of times to scroll other users’ text off the screen. In the early Chat rooms in services like PeopleLink and the early days of AOL, they actually flooded the screen with sizeable quotes from the Monty Python routine. This was generally used as a tactic by insiders of a particular group who wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. This act, previously termed flooding or trashing, came to be called spamming as well. [1] By analogy, the term was soon applied to any large amount of text broadcast by one user, or sometimes by many users.

It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same message. The first evident usage of this sense was by Joel Furr in the aftermath of the ARMM incident of March 31, 1993, in which a piece of experimental software released dozens of recursive messages onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup. Soon, this use had also become established—to spam Usenet was to flood newsgroups with junk messages.

Commercial spamming started in force on March 5, 1994, when a pair of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the “Green Card spam”, after the subject line of the postings. The two went on to widely promote spamming of both Usenet and e-mail as a new means of advertisement—over the objections of Internet users they labeled “anti-commerce radicals.” Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and antispam efforts) moved chiefly to e-mail, where it remains today. [2]

There are three popular fake etymologies of the word “spam”. The first, promulgated by Canter & Siegel themselves, is that “spamming” is what happens when one dumps a can of SPAM luncheon meat into a fan blade. The second is the backronym “shit posing as mail.” The third is similar, using “stupid pointless annoying messages.”

Hormel Foods Corporation, the makers of SPAM® luncheon meat, do not object to the Internet use of the term “spamming.” However, they do ask that the capitalized word “SPAM” be reserved to refer to their product and trademark. [3] By and large, this request is obeyed in forums which discuss spam—to the extent that to write “SPAM” for “spam” brands the writer as a newbie. However, Hormel has begun to press the trademark issue—first, when a firm registered the trademark “SpamArrest” in 2003, Hormel sued to invalidate the mark, [4], and more recently two failed attempts to revoke the mark “spambuster”.[5], [6]

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.