After a decade of experimentation, companies have yet to find a reliable way to burnish their brands online. Research shows barely more than one in 1,000 people click on banner ads. What’s more, they rarely hang around long enough to absorb a brand message.

Former Madison Avenue hotshot Matt Freeman aims to change all that. Freeman’s company, Betawave, is developing ways to boost visitor “engagement” and plans to charge advertisers not just by each click or view but also by people’s attentiveness. The concept is untested, but it has generated excitement. Several venture capital shops in December put $22.5 million into Betawave. “Matt’s ahead of the curve,” says Sean Finnegan, chief digital officer at Starcom MediaVest, which buys ads for Coca-Cola (KO), Procter & Gamble (PG), Nintendo, and others.

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Coca-Cola’s decision to pause and rethink their involvement with Facebook’s Beacon advertising program was a big topic of discussion over the weekend in this corner of the Internet we call the blogosphere. It was a particularly shocking reversal, given that Coke was one of the landmark partners of Facebook’s new social-advertising effort. Coke, to put it bluntly, threw Facebook under the bus, essentially shirking away from their own role in the Beacon controversy, much like 44 other partners who teamed up with Facebook. … Read the rest of this post