so compelling (other than the fact that the CEO Sean Rad is a great young technology leader and his advisers – Brian Norgard , Dan Gould and Evan Rifkin - are some of the guys I respect most in the LA tech market.) Advertising is also what allows you to watch Hulu for free, use Yahoo! That’s a good thing – it means there’s Advertising has driven the majority of Internet innovation My firm GRP Partners recently funded a young LA based company named Ad.Ly that is an “in-stream advertising” company currently focused on monetizing Twitter. 

One of the investment themes I’ve been focused on in the past 3 years has been Performance-Based Marketing.  When When I started investing the US advertising market was $300 billion with only 10% of it ($30 billion) of it being online and measurable.  One One recession later and the US advertising market is about $245 billion – but still only 10-12% is online and measurable. By now we all know that the largest part of the online spend has been SEM (search engine marketing) where people buy CPC (cost per click) links to display alongside the “organic” search results in the search engine.  My

During the panel, the question of market vs team in venture/angel investing came up. Jason was in the “team” camp while Reid was more in “market” camp – but these are very broad generalizations and both emphasized the importance of both in any investment they make. On several occasions, I have heard this debate of market vs team with Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins being used as the poster children for each view point, respectively. Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a small panel discussion between Jason Green (General Partner at Emergence Capital and investor in companies such as DoubleClick, aQuantive, and Ask Jeeves) and Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn, EVP at Paypal, and angel investor in over 60 startups such as Facebook, IronPort, Flickr, and Digg).

Los Angeles-based Demand Media , the online media venture of Richard Rosenblatt, announced Monday afternoon that it has hired on Joanne Bradford, most recently Yahoo's SVP of U.S. Revenue and Market Development, as its Chief Revenue Officer. Tags: bradford joanne yahoo executive media deman According to Demand, Bradford will oversee brand advertisers on the firm's top 20 owned and operated web sites. Bradford reports to Rosenblatt.

Los Angeles-based Demand Media , the online media venture of Richard Rosenblatt, has apparently scored a high profile executive from Yahoo, according to reports. According to AllThingsD, Joanne Bradford, most recently Yahoo's SVP of U.S. Revenue and Market Development, is leaving Yahoo for Demand Media to serve as Chief Revenue Officer. Bradford had also served at Spot Runner and Microsoft. READ MORE>> ...Tags:

In a major deal, search portal provider Yahoo and software giant Microsoft said that the two companies are in a deal where Yahoo will replace its own search engine technology with that of Microsoft--with potentially huge repercussions to Yahoo's Southern California search engine marketing operations. Yahoo and Microsoft said that Yahoo will use the technology behind Microsoft's Bing search engine to power all of the web search aspects of its web site, with Yahoo taking over premium search advertising sales for Microsoft. The two specifically said, in an oblique reference to Google, that the move would provide an alternative to advertisers, so that they no longer to have "rely on one company that dominates more than 70 percent of all search."

Pasadena-based Perfect Market, the Idealab-backed startup which is looking to help publishers monetize their underutilized and archive content, said Wednesday that it has created a new advisory board. The firm said that it has added Darshan Kantak, Chief Product Architect for Yahoo's Marketing Products Division; Larry Goodman, President of White Mountain Media; Jonah Schnel of the Ezralow Company; and Chris Muller, Director of Business Development of Synthasite, to its advisory group. Perfect Market is looking to apply search engine marketing and search engine optimization techniques to what has traditionally been considered "archive" content--for example, old advice articles from newspapers and magazines.

Panache said that Kellond joins the firm from Yahoo, where she was Vice President of Advertiser Product Marketing. Los Angeles-based online advertising firm Panache said today that it has named Cheryl Kellond as its new Executive Vice President. Kellond has also served at Adobe. Panache is a provider of online advertising products focused

And, companies are looking for ways to use social media in their marketing to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to their Web site. The The area of social media marketing is challenging for most corporate marketing people because it's so different from one-way mass media advertising. In addition to being two-way marketing (or one-to-one marketing), social media marketing is both very personal and very public. The popularity of social networking among friends — and would-be friends — is fast becoming "social media." Individuals

And, companies are looking for ways to use social media in their marketing to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to their Web site. The The area of social media marketing is challenging for most corporate marketing people because it's so different from one-way mass media advertising. In addition to being two-way marketing (or one-to-one marketing), social media marketing is both very personal and very public. The popularity of social networking among friends — and would-be friends — is fast becoming "social media." Individuals