Nonprofit animal-rights group SPCA International is using the November 15 premiere of a documentary about Operation Baghdad Pups, a program that reunites members of the US Armed Forces with pets they befriended overseas, to connect with donors via e-mail blasts.

Visitors spend nearly twice as much time, an average of 60 seconds, hovering over rich media ads with video than rich media ads without video — which get an average of 30 seconds — according to a recent study conducted by Eyeblaster. The online advertising company analyzed more than 100 billion impressions from about 30,000 campaigns worldwide between the fourth quarter of 2008 through the third quarter of this year.

Marketers often cite cutting through the clutter as the goal of a new campaign — but how many of those messages are perceived as clutter themselves by consumers? According to a poll from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and InfoPrint Solutions Company, 41% of consumers say they would consider ending a brand relationship due to irrelevant promotions, and another 22% say they would definitely defect from the brand for that reason.

Publicis Groupe announced on November 16 the launch of MS&L Group, a services group that will mix various types of the holding company's firms. MS&L Worldwide, Publicis Consultants Worldwide, JKL, Winner & Associates, TMG Strategies, PBJS, Relay, Capital MS&L, Hanmer MS&L, Carré Noir, SAS, Masius and Publicis Events will make up the division.

Calvin Klein and perfume company COTY are using an increased amount of social media and Internet marketing to promote CKFree, a cologne aimed at men ages 18 to 34 who identify themselves as independent, modern thinkers.

While the social media channel provides a glut of data for those listening and participating, marketers have struggled to find relevant ways to tie time and money invested in the channel to ROI and sales objectives. DMNews asked marketing experts for advice on making social media more accountable.

Juice maker Welch's, which spent $4 million online last year, launched its "Real. Grape. Goodness" integrated effort, November 12. It includes TV, online and print components.

When Bigelow Tea wanted to attract more visitors to its Web site and better engage them, it launched the Tea Talk blog and corresponding social network presence on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. The social media presence especially came in handy last year, when a subset of customers was outraged at the discontinuation of the Fruit and Almond Tea, and Bigelow — the person — answered.

A troubled 2009 has seen cutbacks and ad budget freezes across all industries. Both consumers and executives have dithered in purchase decisions, absorbing information, coupons, custom content, product reviews, free trials and freebies before signing the check or invoice.

The University of Missouri just released an interesting study about the emotional impact of search content versus Web site content when surfing the Web. According to the findings, users retain the emotional content of an item far better when they've searched for it rather than clicked on it through other content searching.