Just one more week to go before the Bears win the Super Bowl.

CBS will partner with TiVo to promote a couple of its shows in the time leading up to the Super Bowl. That includes sneak peaks in the TiVo Showcase and one-click recording of the game itself.

More chatter, this time from the New York Times, about how to maximize the return on the $2.6 million it cost to get a TV spot during the game.

Snapple is buying its first ever Super Bowl ad to promote the health benefits of its Green, Red, White and Black teas.

Steve Hall reminds us all that SpotBowl will be tallying up viewer ratings of the game's commercials. Remember to vote early and often and abuse the system as much as possible to favor spots you personally worked on.

AdFreak points to a pair of best/worst of all time lists. It's amazing how these stories get published every year.

Google has begun inserting video ads as post-roll spots on music videos from Warner Music and Sony BMG. This follows a successful test of the system involving MTV's websites. [via Fimoculous] That's going so well that it's decided to expand the system to even more publishers of its AdSense ads.

Google has announced that, even though YouTube results will show up in Google Video searches, the two operations will remain separate entities.

Some ad execs who are focused on branding campaigns say Google hinders their efforts by not allowing them to use third-party ad management software to structure their campaigns.

Yahoo will begin taking the efficiency of an ad at actually converting surfers into buyers when it places ads when it launches its new ranking model next month.

Finally, former WIN capo Jason Calacanis points to someone's fun mock up of how video ads might look if they started appearing in Google search results.

Wait a minute - what's this? Some Microsoft news? Oh-kaaaaay. The company, a perpetual third-place to the other two, has announced it's having far greater success with its display ads than search. This is shocking to whom, exactly?

A new campaign from the Ad Council aimed at curbing teenage car wreck fatalities is highlighting the responsibility others in the car have. The campaign urges those who feel uncomfortable with someone's driving habits to "speak up" and overcome their fear of being ridiculed by the group. A series of spots shows situations where someone in the back of the car is encouraged by a narrator character to voice their concerns over the driver's irresponsible behavior.

Ads in comics are nothing new. Ever since kids everywhere were enticed to send a couple bucks to an address for a pair of x-ray specs there have been ads within the funny books. Today the ads are a little (but not a lot) different. Most of the ones I see are for licensed merchandise bearing super-hero images or video games. That's leading at least one person to say there's tremendous untapped potential for advertisers within comics. With characters from Marvel and DC becoming more ingrained into the pop culture through big-screen movies the books those characters are drawn from are becoming bigger and bigger business.

The audience that reads them, specifically, is often one that has a good amount of disposable income, is a young adult and is tech savvy. That's a demographic that is often in marketers' cross-hairs. While I share some of the wariness of JK at Newsarama about more ads intruding on my comic reading, from an advertising perspective this makes sense. Seems there's a lot of potential money being left on the table by not advertising more in comics.

It's not bad enough that direct-to-consumer advertisements have people diagnosing themselves and twisting the arms of their doctors until they give them specific brand name medication. Now we're starting to see ads for medical equipment.

This isn't run-of-the-mill walkers or diabetes testing equipment, though. A company who makes them has begun advertising their $30,000 heart defibrillator, a device that needs to be surgically implanted into a patient. The $100 million campaign is aimed both at informing doctors of the device as well as consumers. If this begins a new wave of medical advertising it has the potential to increase sales of those brands that can afford to market themselves in much the same way as when Big Pharma has seen since 1998, when ad rules on medication were lifted. It could also contribute to the ever increasing cost of health coverage in much the same way as when those medication ads were given more ad leeway.

An Illinois consumer watchdog group has urged makers of alcoholic drinks they feel are being marketed to kids to stop doing so reports the Chicago Tribune. The Illinois Alcoholism and Drug Dependence Association has called on makers of drinks like Mike's Hard Lemonade and others to curb practices that they say make the drinks appealing to kids. The group is using the term "alcopop" to describe such drinks. A 2003 FTC report said there was no evidence kids in particular were being targeted by ads for these products, but anecdotes in the story suggest that consumption is widespread among teens.

Mitchum deodorant has created a fun and sexy site that tests to see whether you're manly enough to be a true Mitchum Man. Nina, the hostess on the site, quizzes you on things like you're perfect date, your ideal car and other such topics. If you answer in a manly enough fashion than she undresses slightly. Finally you get your man score as Nina ditches the sexy professional look and adopts the sexy school girl outfit. Go take the Man-o-Meter test yourself. You can also check out outtakes from Nina's video shoot after the jump.

Chocolate maker Hershey's feels that they're not advertising enough. That's why the solution they've adopted to turn around disappointing fourth quarter 2006 sales is that of doubling ad spending. Specifically, the brands will that carry the Hershey's name as well as Reese's products. As part of the overall ad rejuvenation, the company has decided to continue advertising on Wal-Mart TV, the retailer's in-store network. Use of Wal-Mart TV in the past has, according to CEO Richard Lenny, produced greater ROI than traditional TV buys and come complete with other in-store promotions as well.

The Oxygen cable network has begun the upfront season a bit early by announcing a bevy of shows it will be trying to sell to advertisers. The one of most interest to AdJab readers might be "AdFight" which will pit ten teams made up of professionals, students and amateurs who compete to create a new campaign for a big company that won't be revealed until the final show. That and a variety of other female-targeted shows will be offered up as Oxygen takes advantage of new viewer data that shows it skewing younger in terms of audience as well as growing its overall audience.

Just for the record, I proposed a sort of advertising-based reality show here at AJ quite a while ago. I'm just saying.

Here's some news that will help you anticipate better what you're likely to see in the ad programming that shows in theaters before the trailers start.

National CineMedia has announced it will begin including previews from the Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and Travel Channel in its pre-show entertainment. The previews will be intergrated into National Cinemedia's "First Look" feature that also includes long-form movie previews and more.

Another major in-theater network, Screenvision, has said it is buying the assets of Cinema Screen Media. That purchase will expand Screenvision's reach to almost 15,000 screens for its ad network.

Heath Row, though, points out on his Advercise blog how most of the local-targeted ads that run in these ad pods aren't contextually relevant to the movie going experience. Instead they often advertise dry cleaners and orthodontists, services that might be fine but which are in sharp contrast to everything else the audience members are experiencing. Row hypothesizes that the expanded reach of these networks will open up the door to national advertisers or others. Even so, his point that advertising for carpet cleaning services is a far cry from the types of ads people are seeing now, especially online. There people are becoming accustomed to ads that roughly match the information they've just searched for or are reading. The sort of advertising dissonance in theaters can be jarring.

Coke is back in the Super Bowl after nearly a decade away from the game. Its two first half spots, one 30 and one 60 seconds in length, will take the soda company head to head with arch rival Pepsi, which is a perennial advertiser.

A pregnant Chicago-area woman who's also a huge Bears fan is offering advertising space on her swollen belly to get the money to try and buy Super Bowl tickets. She's also willing to trade the space for actual tickets if anyone has them.

Tim Nudd points out all the stylistic points included in this year's official game logo and wonders whether we all think it actually works or not.

"Are Super Bowl ads worth it?" asks CNN Money. While on the surface my answer would be no, the article does point out that there needs to be something worth talking about with the ads in order for them to really impact on the audience. Reuters covers much the same territory.

InfoUSA is purchasing its first ever Super Bowl ad to promote SalesGenie and will also be sponsoring the pre-game broadcast.

CBS affiliates have a few spots in each quarter that have been made available for local advertisers who want to get in on the game but don't have $2.6 million lying around. Some national advertisers are buying these spots as a way to get around another company's exclusive ad buys at a network level.

Someone created a kind of funny fake Disney Super Bowl ad.

Online ad revenue is gaining major credibility among newspapers who, just a few short years ago, had dismissed internet ads as an inconsequential part of their business model. Now, though, the power balance has shifted to the online world and newspapers are scrambling to keep up. A good number of publishers have joined with Yahoo in the creation of a shared network for the selling of classified and jobs ads. Separate from that, Tribune Co, McClatchy and Gannett have formed their own ad sales network, giving potential buyers one-stop access to all their online titles.

Unfortunately, says one analyst, the dollar amount that can be charged per online reader is miniscule compared to that for a print reader. That will lead to more staff cuts as papers optimize their manpower and declining operating income as the papers adjust to new economic realities. That disparity of ad income per reader will also have quit an impact when you consider many people are abandoning print versions altogether in favor or reading the paper online.

Revenue growth numbers continue to erode every year as it becomes clearer and clearer how much market share has been lost by papers. That might be turned around if the papers tap into what some say is the one remaining growth opportunity available to them, national advertising. The problem with executing on this is that without a network of papers that cross regional lines, national advertisers are reluctant to buy ads in local papers. That's where networks like the one setup by Gannett/Tribune/McClatchy may have an advantage.

Nielsen has released a report saying that, by putting their shows on the web and making them available for viewing there or on mobile devices, networks are allowing more people to watch those shows.

Can I get a "No s**t, Sherlock!" from the congregation!

Seriously, though, digital distribution is attractive to networks because they can either charge for the ad-free download or present online streams whose inserted ads can't be skipped or fast-forwarded through. Either of those are attractive options since ad-skipping on regular TV using DVRs is a major point of frustration for networks and advertisers alike.