The Web consulting firm Blue State Digital helped the Obama campaign raise some $500 million online, catapulting a relative political novice into the Oval Office.

Its next challenge: Help fashion bible Vogue magazine cash in on its far-reaching influence at a time when advertising dollars are bleeding out of print.

Vogue has hired Blue State Digital to help analyze the Conde Nast publication’s audience as part of a broader, revenue-generating push that ultimately will involve implementing paid subscriptions on Vogue.com, said Tom Florio, publishing director for Vogue and several other Conde Nast magazines.

The collaboration between magazine publisher and Web strategist began several months ago when Diego Scotti, Vogue’s executive director of marketing, emailed Blue State Digital co-founder Joe Rospars. Vogue executives, keenly aware that the monthly magazine is just one of many ways people connect with the publication, had been looking for ways to capitalize on its influence.

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Demand Media has advertising-driven content down to a science. Instead of creating content for the Web and hoping that it generates revenue, the company works backwards by determining how much revenue each piece will generate before anything is produced.

The company uses a series of algorithms to pick through keywords that people are searching for on the Web and aims to create content unique enough to rank highly in those search results. It also determines how much advertisers would pay to be next to that content.

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International Business Machines (IBM) and a handful of other major marketers, including casino operator Harrah’s Entertainment and software giant Microsoft (MSFT), are experimenting with developing ad campaigns based in part on what consumers are chatting about on the Web.

For decades, advertisers have relied heavily on sometimes-dated consumer surveys and focus groups to provide grist for their ads. Now, some are using new technologies to scan the Web for key words to find out what consumers are–and aren’t–saying about their brands.

Then, they are incorporating those findings into their more-conventional research and using them not only to choose the overall themes of their marketing campaigns, but also specific text and photos for their ads.

Once the campaigns are up and running, the companies and their ad firms are using the same Web-scanning technologies to gauge consumer reaction to their messages, and to fine-tune them to boost performance.

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These days, videogame platform makers often boast that they are also entertainment hubs.

Microsoft (MSFT) can now add some credibility to that claim. On Thursday, the company announced a partnership with Nielsen that brings TV ratings to Xbox Live’s “1 vs. 100″ online trivia game show.

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Fans of “Twilight” and “New Moon” already have plenty to be scared about–vampires, werewolves, a swirling debate over the feminist values of Stephenie Meyer’s hit series.

But what about malware? According to reports from the around the Internet this morning, the Twihard set was recently targeted by a group of online scammers, who sought to profit off the “New Moon” hype.

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Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers’ personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes.

In recent years, marketers have grown more adept at culling consumer data from an array of online and offline sources–including real-estate and motor-vehicle records, consumer surveys, credit-card data and logs of Web visitors’ online behavior–to identify the most receptive audiences for their ads.

At a hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee plans to explore the impact of these practices on consumer privacy, and will hear from witnesses including advertising giant WPP, database-marketing company Acxiom (ACXM), privacy advocates and others.

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Several Internet stocks are taking some heat this morning following the release yesterday of a Senate report on aggressive sales tactics on the Web–and in particular singling out for scorn a practice known as “post-transaction marketing.”

The report, issued by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, asserts that three Connecticut-based direct marketing companies–Affinion (which is owned by Apollo Management), Vertrue (which is owned by investors One Equity Partners, Rho Ventures and Brencourt Advisors as well as members of management) and Webloyalty–and their e-commerce partners have together raked in over $1.4 billion in revenue “by using aggressive tactics to charge Internet shoppers for club membership programs.”

These guys are responsible for the stream of offers you get for trials in membership clubs, “cash back,” and other services when you are buying movie tickets, airline tickets, flowers or others goods on the Web.

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Cybercriminals are capitalizing on swine-flu fears by pitching sales of fake Tamiflu, security firm Sophos said.

Networks of fraudsters use spam and malware to direct Web traffic to phony pharmaceutical sites, wrote Graham Cluley, a technology consultant for Sophos.

“Although unwitting buyers do often receive some kind of drug as result of the transactional exchange, at best the drug doesn’t work and at worse it can pose serious health risks,” he added. Cybercriminals are “putting their customers’ health, personal information and credit card details at risk” with these counterfeit versions of Tamiflu.

Many of these fraudulent pharmaceutical sites originate in Russia, Sophos’s Dmitry Samosseiko noted in a paper on the topic. One network called GlavMed, for example, has more than 120,000 online pharmacy sites selling generic drugs under the name of Canadian Pharmacy.

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First, let’s set the scene: In one corner, you have Verizon (VZ). The company recently launched a series of ads attacking AT&T’s (T) 3G network. The spots, revolving around the phrase “there’s a map for that,” show side-by-side maps of AT&T’s and Verizon’s networks and claim Verizon has five times more 3G coverage. Combine those with the ongoing series of iPhone-bashing Droid commercials, and you’ve got a powerful one-two punch heading straight toward AT&T’s kisser.

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Probably the funniest bit of commercial ingenuity I’ve seen these past few months is the growth of corpse-spam in World of Warcraft. You see, it’s quite hard, in-game, to spam people with commercial messages. If you send messages to people you get blocked and reported and your account shut down.

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Yet another News Corporation (NWS) executive is talking about Google (GOOG), and yet again, I feel like they have no concept about how Google interacts with their web pages. Which is frightening, since they’re being very vocal about how they’re supposedly wronged by Google. Please, someone, give them a search marketing 101 course.

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Eager to expand use of the Web to advertise their products, pharmaceutical giants, including Eli Lilly (LLY) and Pfizer (PFE), are heading to Washington this week to call on the Food and Drug Administration to provide guidelines for marketing prescription drugs online.

Wayne Gattinella, CEO of WebMD, is among the drug-industry leaders expected to attend Thursday’s FDA hearing on online advertising.

Drug companies are dabbling with Internet advertising, but their efforts have been minimal. Most of the ads promote broader health or corporate initiatives, rather than individual medicines. That’s chiefly due to industry fears of running afoul of regulators.

Seeking a bigger piece of one of the country’s largest ad categories, Web companies including Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and WebMD Health (WBMD) are also planning to attend Thursday’s hearing at the FDA, which has been scrutinizing drug makers’ digital marketing efforts.

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In case you missed it, Google (GOOG) acquired mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in stock.

There’s a lot of speculation on why, but the obvious reason is that Google wants more direct access to what they are betting heavily on–that mobile is the next great advertising medium. It’s made a huge bet on mobile with Android, which is an obvious move to own the mobile search ad market, but now it’s got its hooks into the mobile display ad market as well.

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Google (GOOG) plans to buy back $750 million of its common stock to offset dilution from shares to be issued in the pending all-stock acquisition of AdMob, CEO Eric Schmidt told Bloomberg yesterday.

In a research note, Broadpoint.Amtech analyst Benjamin Schachter notes that this will be the first time Google has ever repurchased any of its own shares, despite its $22 billion cash position.

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Blowing away terrorists, apparently, never gets old.

The new videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, set to hit stores Tuesday, is a sequel spawned by sequels. But rather than following the frequent pattern of franchises fading as they age, Modern Warfare 2 is the most highly anticipated game of the season.

“It’s the biggest launch in our history, bigger than Halo 3,” said Tony Bartel, merchandising and marketing chief for videogame retailer GameStop, which has been taking pre-orders since April.

The manufacturer, Activision Blizzard Inc. (ATVI), has been advertising the first-person shooter game since March.

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