There is a lot of buzz, hype, critical analysis, and downright drivel out there about trends in marketing and ad spending. Some have even asked whether advertising is dead. They're wrong.

Advertising is not dead folks, it has become more vibrant and complex than ever. It's growing in the online world where aggressive metrics and analysis demand instant accountability.

Here's an experiment: Try to go the next five minutes without seeing some kind of add. Ooops, too late, already happened, right?

In the Q4 of 2009, online advertising hit a new all-time quarterly high of $6.3 billion. What's changing about advertising is that its morphing, and the metrics and data used to track it are becoming more sophisticated than ever.

Take the famous "Cog" ad by Honda. Reportedly took $6M and more than three months to develop this high-concept, cross platform viral video ad. It got lots of media attention too:

Sometimes it's nice to get away a few days, disconnect, and refresh the mind. And then you come back, and find out that Facebook wants to rule the world. I was aware of the Facebook f8 announcements last week, but an impending vacation spared me the need to expend brainpower on it. I did not hop on this Facebook F8 story like all the other slathering Web 2.0 toadies out there. No, we're not like this. This is supposed to be an analytical and skeptical source of information. So I will tell you: Facebook wants to take everything. Watch out or they'll pick your pocket. The heart of these new Facebook initiatives, loosely grouped as the "open graph," is that if you "opt in" to Facebook's new personalization tools, it will be able to track pretty much anything you do on the Web and your information relationships to other Facebook friends  -- and show it to other people. Now, Facebook uses the term "opt-in" loosely. That's because it has automatically opted in its hundreds of millions of users. Facebook apparently knows when and where you want to "opt." Here's what I think about that: Boy, these Facebook people sure are greedy. They want to control everything. And most people who are trying to compete with them are pretty much screwed. Especially media companies and publishers. Many Facebook competitors for sure. If you are a publisher or some sort of niche social network, you should be very, very careful of you you use the new Facebook APIs. Yes, it's true, Facebook's new tools will make it easier for you to "plug in" to social network. You may get more traffic. But guess what -- who owns the data? Facebook. As soon as you hook into Facebook, you will be handing them over the keys to your kingdom. And you know Facebook wants to advertise to your users. It's all about the data. Google is about the data. Facebook is about the data. If you do anything on the Web that entails a service, content, and advertising, it's about the data of your users. That's your gold. And Facebook now wants to hijack all of the data on the entire Web. This is why Google engineers are freaked out about it. Geddit now? So the big question is: Are users going to allow them to do that? Well, they already have. Because Facebook has decided by default that you are opted in. Well, you say, the Web is already like that. Like Scott McNealy famously said, there is no such thing as privacy anymore. But I'm not just talking about privacy. Yes, the privacy freaks are going to have a cow about this. And you should really be concerned about which settings you've checked on Facebook. But I'm not just talking about that. I'm talking about business. Control. Owning things. We are told now, over and over, that Facebook has 400 million users. It's allegedly surpassed Google in total audience (I still have a hard time believing this). So the really already own a lot of stuff. But that's not enough for the Zuck-man. Now not only does he want to own all these users, but he wants access to every single piece of data about where they go, what they like, and how they interact with the Internet. Do you trust them? I don't.

This is a big year for new Google products, as the company has introduced its own smartphone, the Nexus One, and is in the process of trying to buy AdMob, the mobile advertising player, pending Federal Trade Commission (FTC) review. I thought it would be a good idea to run through the Google earnings call from last week and see which key trends the company is focusing on. Here they are:

• Mobile advertising. Google sees huge growth in mobile advertising. This is why they would like to close the AdMob deal. On the earnings call, the company said that advertising customers are seeing increased mobile search & advertising activity and and that the company is focused on a "mobile first" strategy of adding mobile-friendly features. It was mum on what's going on with AdMob and the FTC other than saying they are "working with the FTC."
• Location: A main component of mobile is location. During the quarter Google launched Near Me Now which allows you to search via location to find services in the vicinity.
• Android & Chrome growth: Google is pushing hard with its new operating systems. The company said that Android is now powering 34 devices, up 70% quarter-over-quarter. 60,000 Android devices are sold and activated every day, according to Google. There are now 38,000 apps, up 70% quarter-over-quarter.
• Nexus One Profitable: The company stated on the conference call that Nexus One is now a profitable business.
• Traffic acquistion costs: On the negative side, Google's costs for traffic acquisition were up. One financial analyst noticed that it's interesting that Google is becoming more of a marketing company. Traffic acquisition costs were $1.7 billion or 26% of total advertising revenue. in fact, overall, Google's marketing spend overall increased nearly 50% year-over-year.
• Paid Click & Ad trends: Susan Wojcicki, VP of products, Google said: "We saw advertisers come back and start spending again driven by a lot of our largest advertisers really increasing their spend ..."
• Social Networking Competition: Perhaps the most interesting part of the conference call came when a financial analyst, Imran Khan of JP Morgan, asked about growth in social networks, including Facebook : "They are growing significantly faster as a [profit] source to a lot of your big customers like Ebay. How do you think Facebook and other social networking sites are a big long-term threat to Google’s business model?" Google's answer: "We don't comment on the issue of Facebook."

Well, they did it: Twitter has announced a business model. It's called advertising. Heard of it before? They are calling it "Promoted Tweets." What's interesting is that the social media company (can we now call them a social marketing company?) has figured out a way to weave sponsored tweets into the fabric of the system: That is users, can essentially vote about which ads stay or go. Sponsored Tweets will be bought and plugged into the system, clearly marked as sponsored. This will happen via the search page, where sponsors will bid for search terms, a la Google. Users can treat them like regular tweets -- for example, retweet them -- or ignore them. Posts that get sufficiently ignored will presumably go away, according to Twitter. The initial sponsors -- Twitter calls then "innovative advertising partners" -- will include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America. I am quickly imagining the Twitter-scape littered with Red Bull-fueled promotion artists.

You gotta love Rupert Murdoch. While many media executives are hunkered down in their bunkers, whimpering about lost revenue streams and afraid to say anything remotely offensive to people like Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the News Corp. CEO is still firing off missives about how Google is stealing money from him. Let's follow the story from the beginning. Murdoch has been an aggressive champion of the idea that content should be paid for and not given away from free. That's why he's locking most of the Wall Street Journal, which the News Corp. owns, behind a paywall. He's said that he'll take most of News Corp.'s content sites behind paywalls in due time.

I have been looking forward to a big Google-Apple brawl which I'm sure is only going to get more nasty. It looks like it's escalating quite rapidly, with AllThingsD reporting that Apple is set to announce its own ad platform. This would make things very interesting between Google and Apple. Google clearly is dominant in the online advertising space, but needs to make more inroads. That's why it is in the process of buying Admob, a transaction which is being reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Apple, on the other hand, clearly has a dominant mobile platform and thinks it would be nice to roll up some advertising with that to beat Google at its own game. AllThingsD's Peter Kafka points out that when Apple announces an ad platform, it will be difficult for the FTC to argue that Google is building a monopoly, especially when Apple is so powerful in the mobile space:

Why would Google applaud the entrance of a new advertising rival? Because Google is trying to convince federal regulators that it has advertising rivals so that it can proceed with its $750 million purchase of AdMob. That deal is being held up for review by the Federal Trade Commission, and there have been consistent murmurs from Washington that the purchase could be in jeopardy. Apple’s plan to get into mobile advertising has been apparent since early January when the company purchased Quattro Wireless for $275 million. Like AdMob, Quattro specializes in ads that run within apps. That’s a tiny market now, but it’s expected to grow along with the booming app economy, pushed by the mobile platforms Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) are promoting.

All the more evidence that the companies are headed for a gigantic collisions in the mobile space. Google is ramping up its Android mobile operating system and will be on a lot more phones by the end of the year. These two companies are going to be going head-to-head in the online advertising space.

BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol, who just landed $21 million in financing and whose company has an interesting vision for the future of the Internet advertising industry, spoke with The Rayno Report on Monday about the direction of his company and the new financing.  Tawakol believes his company is onto a multi-billion dollar opportunity. BlueKai aggregates anonymous user data from across the Internet for advertising agencies. It tracks the anonymous user data with a cookie. BlueKai's partners and customers then pay for access to that data and the cookie through an auction process, so that they can see more detailed information about users and target their ads more specifically. Tawakol believes the industry is in the midst of a data "paradigm shift," in that the data aggregation model exists in the offline world, but has not yet been effectively implemented in the new online world. "It's a paradigm issue," says Tawakol, "The new winners usually come from the new paradigm, not the old one."