Twitter announced a new kind of Tweet today designed to allow marketers to easily collect personal information from Twitter users, if they chose to provide it.

The format, an expanded Tweet called the "Lead Generation Card," includes a button that with one click allows the user to provide their name, email address and Twitter handle to the marketer as a request for a deal, more information or further communication.

The format is designed to help businesses collect leads -- those interested in more information about a product or a service. It's the latest "Twitter Card," an expanded Tweet that contains content far beyond the 140-character limitation of Twitter messages, including images and video.

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The debate over the value of mobile advertising typically focuses on what effect, if any, it has on brand lift, sales and getting consumers into stores. But advertisers have been wasting money on mobile in the literal sense because a significant portion of the ads they're paying for never properly display on devices.

Now, networks and publishers are being pressured to more accurately report how well they deliver ads in an attempt to legitimize the industry and increase mobile-marketing spending.

Apple's iAd earlier this month became the first major mobile-ad network to be fully accredited by the Media Ratings Council as adhering to the standards the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Mobile Marketing Association jointly released earlier this year.

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Credit reporting company Equifax has named Dentsu's 360i its lead agency as it reevaluates its approach to data and analytics.

The shift comes after Equifax selected Publicis Groupe's Digitas as its lead agency in August 2011. 360i will focus on direct-to-consumer integrated marketing efforts for the brand's credit and identity protection services.

Said Digitas in a statement: "We have mutually agreed to part ways after two years of partnership. We have high hopes that success will continue to follow both companies and we wish each other the very best."

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Microsoft unveiled its latest Xbox console, Xbox One, today, and with it, an announcement that the company would be turning it's popular Halo video game franchise into a live-action series with Steven Spielberg as executive producer.

"The Halo universe is an amazing opportunity to be at that intersection where technology and myth-making meet to produce something truly groundbreaking," Mr. Spielberg said in a video clip during the press conference.

Introducing the multiple Oscar winner was Microsoft's president of entertainment and digital media Nancy Tellem. Ms. Tellem was formerly president of CBS Television Studios and a senior adviser to CBS CEO Les Moonves before going to Microsoft to spearhead the company's entry into original programming.

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Brooklyn-based Huge just got a bit smaller.

A group of senior executives from the Interpublic Group of Cos.' digital shop are decamping to start a new shop. Dubbed Work & Company, the agency is launching with: Huge's Founding Partner and Chief Strategy Officer Gene Liebel; Creative Director Joe Stewart, Partner and Head of Product Design Felipe Memoria and VP-Product Design Marcelo Eduardo. Mohan Ramaswamy, a former product strategy lead at Huge and most recently, an engagement manager at McKinsey, is also joining the new shop.

Mr. Liebel has given notice but remains in his role at Huge for the time being.

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TV networks showcasing their wares during the recent upfront have a bigger concern than one-upping their broadcast rivals: grabbing attention from original content on nontraditional platforms, many of which are not ad-supported.

This influx in originals such as Netflix's "House of Cards" and "Hemlock Grove" is being blamed for the overall decline in TV viewership, and potentially stealing dollars from the estimated $63.9 billion U.S. TV-ad market in 2013.

Originals are a small but growing factor. "We think the shift from ad-supported viewing to Netflix had a negative impact of $500 million on total advertising during the quarter," UBS analyst John Janedis wrote in a research note in April.

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Tumblr founder David Karp and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer have a delicate balancing act ahead of them: Assure devout Tumblr users that their beloved platform won't change, while convincing Wall Street that their union will be a lucrative one.

Highlighting how important it is to maintain the Tumblr experience, Yahoo made an outright pledge "not to screw it up" in the press release announcing the $1.1 billion acquisition. Further, the 26-year-old Mr. Karp -- who will be $275 million richer once the deal closes -- will stay put as CEO, and Tumblr will function as a separate business unit.

While Mr. Karp and Ms. Mayer are adamant that Tumblr will continue on its own roadmap, they also say that its ad business will be spurred along with the help of Yahoo's sales organization -- which is 2,500 people strong, compared to Tumblr's existing 25, per Ms. Mayer -- and that Yahoo will introduce new native ad units to the platform.

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News item:

Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr

Promises not to screw it up

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The most glaring question regarding Yahoo's Tumblr acquisition is how it will generate more advertising revenue from a platform that, to date, has taken a minimalist approach to incorporating advertising.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is going to change that, however. Ms. Mayer said Monday morning that Yahoo would introduce more "native advertising" formats to Tumblr. She also said that advertising will eventually appear on an individual's original Tumblr "with the blogger's permission."

"I would expect any ad units to be very native and to follow the form and function of Tumblr," Ms. Mayer said.

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AT&T is the country's fifth largest ad spender -- and now its using data gleaned from its own digital advertising to to help other marketers buying inventory through AT&T's AdWorks business.

The company is unveiling a new platform, called Blueprint, for targeted online, mobile and TV ads. However, the platform falls short of achieving what largely remains elusive for advertisers: a way to target one person or group of the same people across digital, mobile and traditional platforms. At the outset, there will be three Blueprint platforms: one for online, one for mobile and one for TV. Most notably, it will be using the intelligence it gathers from its own corporate digital ad efforts to inform the online Blueprint platform.

"We're both an ad network and an advertiser ... our ads show up in thousands of websites that go beyond our network. The nice thing about that is we can leverage that learning," said Maria Mandel Dunsche, head of marketing and media for AT&T's AdWorks. The company's own ads create 4 billion signals per month that it uses to identify audience segments and interest categories, said Ms. Mandel Dunsche.

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This story has been updated.

Like a host of other brands, Yahoo has a millennial problem, and its acquisition of Tumblr could be a step toward fixing it. But will new ownership help Tumblr with one of its biggest problems -- drawing major advertisers?

All Things D on Sunday morning reported that the Yahoo board unanimously approved the deal to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion.

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It was Larry Page's Willy Wonka moment: The Google CEO was handing out pairs of Google Glasses to anyone who could dream up a novel way to use the device. All they had to do was submit the idea via Twitter or Google Plus and pony up $1,500.

More than a few agency execs ended up with golden Glass tickets, and they're toying with how the technology could be used in marketing.

Ian Schafer, CEO at digital agency Deep Focus, was awarded a pair after posting on his G+ account: "#ifihadglass no matter how far away I was from home, my family would be close." MDC Partners-owned KBS+ created a website devoted to its employees' contest submissions, and Google greenlit eight of them. Dave Meeker of Aegis-owned Isobar got ahold of the eyewear after stating he wanted to build apps on it for clients. Dentsu's Jeff Hinson snagged a pair for tweeting he'd use Glass to develop an interactive marketing campaign for client New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. And two employees at digital agency Huge won the coveted Glasses.

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Advertising Age makes a cameo appearance in Reddit's new ad-sales pitch deck in the form of a quote grabbed from my recent column about the social-news site: "Reddit has become, simply put, mainstream media." (See slide 3.)

Reddit's new sales and strategy boss, Mike Cole, sent me the whole deck last night and I'm sharing it with you here because, well, it's pretty funny. It tries to make the case for Reddit's reach, cultural power and user engagement using the lingua franca of Reddit: goofy images.

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Does the future of media include breaking-news headlines materializing in front of your eyes as you walk down the street?

CNN and Elle magazine have become the second and third media brands with apps on Google Glass, following The New York Times, and all three are testing early adopters' appetite for a constant stream of content served to them on the go. In their current form, the apps seem to follow the vein of push notifications mobile phone users get increasingly frequently from The Times and The Wall Street Journal. Unlike the apps those push notifications bring users to, however, the media brands' Glass apps aren't allowed to carry ads.

The revenue opportunity is currently minuscule in any case. Google Glass is still only available to a small group of people -- mainly developers -- who plunked down $1,500 for the privilege of beta-testing the device.

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Glass Explorers -- Google's term for the world's select few Google Glass owners -- will soon be able to share their experiences through platforms other than Google's. Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter are all developing apps, or "Glassware," for the wearable device, the companies said Thursday. So get ready for all kinds of Glass explorations in your social feeds.

The companies' arrival on a nascent platform previously limited to apps for The New York Times and networking service Path mean Glass is getting increasingly social. But it still isn't obviously lucrative for anyone but Google.

That's because the company has been adamant about not allowing outside developers to serve ads in Glassware.

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Walmart reported first-quarter sales and earnings that missed forecasts, but it's forging ahead with more local price-comparison ads and e-commerce investments amid signs its executives see that both are working.

Earnings of $1.14 per share for the quarter ended April 30 fell a penny below analyst forecasts. Comparable-store sales for the nameplate U.S. stores fell 1.4%, compared to a forecast of "about flat," breaking a streak of six positive quarters.

But executives pointed to things they said are producing positive results, including aggressive pricing, particularly on groceries, backed by local market-basket price-comparison ads on TV and radio that U.S. CEO Bill Simon said will now expand to 70% of Walmart's markets, up from the current 60%.

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Machinima -- one of the largest channels on the world's largest video platform, YouTube -- is now available without a computer, by way of Xbox Live.

The video entertainment network is already available on iOS and Android apps, but the deal represents its first expansion to a big distribution network beyond YouTube itself. It's also the first time that Xbox Live has simultaneously introduced an app in all of its 41 global markets.

While Machinima is expanding -- the move actually began late last month -- its arrival on Xbox is also a bit of a return of the company's roots: Machinima started out by posting video content related to Xbox video game "Halo." It later grew to encompass all aspects of "geek" culture -- graphic novels, superhero movies and hit TV shows like "The Walking Dead."

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Mozilla's plan to prevent third-party cookies by default is on pause. The company this week decided to test blocking third-party cookies by requiring users to enable the feature -- rather than automatically opting them in.

"There are many conflicting claims about how this patch will affect the Internet," wrote Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla.org and CTO and senior VP of engineering at Mozilla, in a post on his personal blog today.

"Why debate in theory what we can measure in practice? We are going to find out more and adjust course as needed. This is the essence of the release test cycle."

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A team of Newsweek staffers and employees of the design firm Hugewere two months into the redesign of Newsweek.com -- which arrived this afternoon in beta -- when The New York Times published "Snow Fall", its ambitious multimedia story about a deadly avalanche.

"We just looked at each other," said Baba Shetty, CEO of The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, which was formed by the merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast in 2011 and is changing its name to NewsBeast. What The Times had done with "Snow Fall" was similar to the look and feel of the new Newsweek.com they had in mind. "The design was already locked when ["Snow Fall"] was published," Mr. Shetty said. "We were astounded that a path that we had been on had surfaced in the world."

Newsweek shut down its U.S. print edition at the end of the year and survived primarily as a tablet edition called Newsweek Global and a section of The Daily Beast website. Now it was working toward a new long-form, immersive and multi-media experience in the web browser. "Snow Fall" lent the strategy momentum. But Newsweek was planning to do something similar on a weekly basis.

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Agency holding companies established trading desks to leverage their collective size and buying power.

But that hasn't stopped some small agencies from launching their own digital trading operations. Case in point: Interpublic's Campbell-Mithun has decided to build its own trading desk rather than buy separately through IPG Mediabrands' Cadreon.

The objective? To streamline the planning and buying process and allow deeper integration of data from Campbell-Mithun's retail and CPG clients, which is becoming more important in the digital ad buying process than data purchased from third parties.

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ABC will begin measuring advertising in videos viewed with mobile and tablet apps during a trial run with Nielsen, the network said at its upfront presentation to ad buyers Tuesday afternoon.

It will be the first test expanding Nielsen's Online Campaign Ratings to mobile, allowing ABC to measure audience demographics and understand the reach and frequency of online campaigns within apps, according to executives. Nielsen's online ratings currently include video viewed on computer and tablet browsers.

The move comes as ABC introduces a Watch ABC app that will allow cable and satellite TV subscribers to stream ABC's live signal to mobile devices, in addition to the sort of on-demand video that has been the mainstay of network TV Everywhere apps until now.

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The hype around data ain't all it's cracked up to be, and believe it or not, that's something that can be heard often from people who work in data-related fields.

Stewart Pratt, director of data and analytics at SapientNitro is one. Steeped in philosophy and economics, Mr. Pratt has unique theories on the world and data's role in it, combining a dedication to humility with a practical recognition of what data can -- and cannot -- do.

"When I speak about the humility of the modern data scientist, I'm referring to receptivity to the limits and role of big data," he said. "Big data can help us identify correlations we may have otherwise missed, but it isn't well-suited for helping us to understand causality or meaning."

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We're pleased to announce that a new -- yet familiar -- face is coming to Ad Age. Former Adweek reporter Tim Peterson is joining Ad Age this month to cover digital media, ad tech and entertainment out of our San Francisco bureau in the lovely Hearst Building at the corner of Third and Market.

Tim joins bureau chief Cotton Delo, who will continue to cover social media, marketing, brands, agencies and startups. It's been a while since Ad Age has had more than one edit staffer in the Bay Area and we think now's a good time to crank up our coverage there. Tim will take the lead on some great stories, including Marissa Mayer's remake of Yahoo, Google's attempt to turn YouTube into an entertainment powerhouse and the burgeoning tech community that is reinventing the ad business.

Tim's slow, Spicoli-esque drawl is a giveaway of his southern California roots, where he grew up in the shadow of LAX. But he works fast: logging 421 bylines at Adweek since he joined 16 months ago. Some of his best stories included a look at Amazon's ad business, Twitter's talks with Hollywood and Yahoo's deliberations over the fate of Right Media.

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1. Google CEO Larry Page will rethink default privacy settings for Google Glass after embarrassing Google Glass video footage of him pleasuring himself -- by Googling himself (Larry Page net worth, Larry Page private jet ...) -- leaks to Valleywag.

2. In the wake of President Obama's joke at the recent White House Correspondents' Dinner about the rise of BuzzFeed as a media phenomenon -- "I remember when BuzzFeed was just something I did in college around 2 a.m." -- congressional Republicans will launch a formal investigation into exactly what post-toke munchies Obama consumed at Columbia and Harvard (chips? candy bars? day-old pizza?) in an attempt to get him in trouble with first lady Michelle Obama, who is famously an advocate for a healthful diet.

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Hearst Magazines named Troy Young to the new post of president at Hearst Magazines Digital Media this week, citing two decades of experience in the digital world. He is the former president of Say Media, a website publisher with properties including xoJane and ReadWrite, as well as the former chief experience officer of the Omnicom digital agency Organic.

But before those digital jobs, Mr. Young worked in old media, at a now-defunct weekly called the Montreal Mirror. During his tenure at the paper, Mr. Young created a system for the paper's content that let readers to log in and, using a shared desktop, create discussions on stories. This was 1992. "It was our own little hipster AOL," he said.

"It was my discovery of digital," he added, "and it changed my life."

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Nintendo has begun a digital agency review, according to industry executives. California-based External View Consulting Group is managing the search process.

Nintendo currently works with several agencies, including Publicis Groupe's Leo Burnett, which has supported various elements of Nintendo's creative and digital business in the U.S. over the past few years. Nintendo's also worked with other Publicis-owned shops over the years, including Optimedia for digital media-buying and planning and Zenith for broadcast work. Interpublic Group of Cos' GolinHarris has supported Nintendo's PR for a number of years.

Both the consultant and marketer declined to comment for this story.

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YouTube launched its paid channels today with 30 initial partners, allowing creators a business model beyond advertising. Among the first new channels launched today include sports, movies, music, fitness and children's programming. Soon, one channel will launch that has never had advertising: "Sesame Street."

The initiative, an open secret in in the industry, will ultimately be self-serve for YouTube's more than 1 million content partners which will be able to elect to charge a fee starting at 99 cents a month for access. YouTube's head of content partnerships, Malik Ducard said creators could elect to charge subscriptions and to take advertising, but that would be the minority at the outset.

"YouTube shouldn't make the call whether a paid channel has ads or not," he said. "The partners are smarter about their audience and their content than we are."

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BuzzFeed is starting an effort to train agencies in BuzzFeed-style storytelling -- all the better to support its bottom line with sponsored posts, also known as "native advertising."

Its Social Storytelling Creator Program, inspired by agency cultivation efforts at Facebook and Google, is meant to seed the market with agencies and people that will do great work in the social storytelling space, according to Jon Steinberg, president and COO at BuzzFeed, who previously helped develop small business partnerships at Google. "We want more people doing it in a high quality way," he said.

Agencies that take part in the program will receive "accreditation" from BuzzFeed, including a badge they can slap on their website and supporting materials. BuzzFeed won't charge agencies to take part, but does plan to require minimum budgets from the agencies' clients.

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Less than a month after introducing the HTC First -- the first-ever "Facebook Phone" -- AT&T announced it is cutting the price of the phone from $99 to $0.99 with a two-year mobile service contract.

AT&T and HTC downplayed the significance of the price cut, saying such promotions are typical in the mobile industry. But AT&T is just shifting the cost of the phone to the data plan, which will become more expensive over time.

Initially priced at $99, the Facebook phone isn't intended to be a high-end smartphone. Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy S4 cost $199 and $149 with a mobile service contract, respectively. Rather, it was a halo device for AT&T, HTC and Facebook and intended for Facebook "super users" who access the social network all throughout a given day.

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Trade organization the Mobile Marketing Association has commissioned a new study that projects the mobile marketing to add $400 billion in incremental output and nearly a million jobs by to the U.S. economy by 2015.

While the findings are meant to induce marketers to spend more on mobile, the study is also part of the MMA's lobbying effort to illustrate the job creation prospects of mobile marketing and in turn, head off potential regulation.

"Asking a bunch of people who are unfamiliar with mobile marketing to set up digital policy might inhibit innovation," MMA CEO Greg Stuart said. "Let's not stifle job growth."

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