I don’t think that gives you much advantage as a magazine reader to read it on the tablet — in fact less so. It’s a little more difficult. From the publisher’s point of view I would think they’re crazy to encourage it.

Digital unenthusiast Jann Wenner, explaining why he’s not rushing to create special versions of his magazines — US Weekly, Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone — for the iPad or any other tablet. Well worth reading the entire interview in AdAge.

The Web site said in AdAge that no advertisers have signed on yet and that it would help them figure out how to best inject their messages into relevant parts of the site. Greg Coleman, HuffPo’s president and a former Yahoo (YHOO) and AOL (AOL) exec, said a company seeking advertising around the World Series might tweet about baseball, for example.

“You cannot use the social engagement for the purposes of really hawking your products,” he told AdAge. “The advertiser is really put in a position where they need to add value to the conversation that’s taking place.”

The initiative is already generating discussion, not surprisingly, on Twitter, where some users wondered if the extra revenue would go toward compensating the site’s unpaid bloggers. “Losing respect for them, min by min,” Casey Rentz tweeted. Others were more sympathetic: “I have decided that sponsored tweets (a la the HuffPo) are okay, as long as they are clearly marked. I may be a brand tweeter one day,” Jill Elswick wrote.

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If you’re lucky, you can get the press to do some marketing for you. And if you’re really lucky, you can get Apple (AAPL) to do your marketing for you.

The newest set of Apple ads focuses on apps made by big brands–Barnes & Noble, Pizza Hut, Gap, Epicurious and Zagat–that can certainly afford their own promotional pushes.

And certainly those guys paid cash or some other kind of compensation for the consideration, right? Not as far as Advertising Age can discern: The trade mag notes with a bit of dismay that there isn’t any kind of application process to get into Apple commercials and that “the marketers in question didn’t request to be in the commercial at all.”

As far as I can tell, this mirrors Apple’s overall policy for iTunes, whether you’re talking about music, movies or apps: Unlike traditional retailers or even competitors like Amazon (AMZN), there’s no way to buy shelf space at Apple’s digital store. If you want Apple to shine a spotlight on your stuff, you just have to hope that someone there likes your stuff. AdAge:

Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the story, but it’s clear the company looks for apps that use as many aspects of the iPhone as possible, such as sound, shaking, GPS or the camera. It also seemed to favor anything that highlights features of the newest operating system, such as in-app payment. Additionally, it appears that brands are given more credit for good user experience than whether or not they can match Apple’s own cool factor.

Pizza Hut, for instance, doesn’t have many common associations with the tech giant but its app was the first from the quick-service industry that let users place delivery orders.

*Note that Apple’s app ecosystem has grown faster than its ad agency expected; the new campaigns announce that there are 75,000 apps, but that number is 10,000 short, according to a release Cupertino put out yesterday.

In recent weeks, an ad with “230″ appeared on television and the Web. The number appeared on a bright green background, with a smiling electrical outlet in place of the zero. At the bottom, the numbers 8-11 hinted at its reveal date.

AdAge reported Thursday that GM was behind the campaign, though the car manufacturer and its agency, Starcom New York, wouldn’t spill details.

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Now Razorfish is formally on the block: The Financial Times reports that Microsoft (MSFT) has hired Morgan Stanley to hawk the agency and suggests that French ad conglomerate Publicis Groupe could be a buyer. Then again, so could every other big ad holding company, including Omnicom (OMC) and WPP (WPPGY).

The FT throws out a value of $600-$700 million for Razorfish, down from the $800 million price tag that AdAge put on the shop last summer, which was the last time sales chatter heated up. At the time, the buyer was supposed to be WPP. Microsoft paid $6 billion for all of aQuantive in 2007.

Why has everyone been so convinced that Microsoft would sell something it bought in 2007? Because everyone thought that Microsoft never wanted Razorfish–it wanted the rest of aQuantive’s ad network business. And presumably what it really wanted was Doubleclick’s ad network business, but Google (GOOG) beat it out on that deal. Yahoo (YHOO) had already bought RightMedia and WPP bought 24/7 Real Media. (Boy, a lot of money was spent on ad networks back then! And not coincidentally, a flood of ad network start-ups flooded the market shortly after those transactions went through.)

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own people have never tried particularly hard to argue that the company was committed to owning an ad agency. Though they did try to argue that owning one wasn’t a conflict with the online publishing business it keeps burning money on. Now that won’t be a problem.

[Image credit: g-hat]

I think these clips are reasonably good at getting across the notion that regular search engines — that’d be Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) — aren’t as good as they could be. But again, I’ll let you folks handle the ad critique. I remain dubious about the overall strategy, which involves spending up to $100 million to promote a Web service.

But Microsoft’s (MSFT) latest campaign, which features documentary-like tales of  youngish people priced out by Apple (AAPL), may actually be working. At least when it comes to youngish people’s perceptions of the two brands. So says tracking service BrandIndex. More from AdAge:

The perceptions of value the two brands offer has shifted dramatically in the eyes of 18- to 34-years-olds since Microsoft began running its “Laptop Hunters” campaign in late March. Apple’s “value perception” has fallen considerably, while Microsoft’s has risen…

Based on daily interviews of 5,000 people, BrandIndex found the age group gave Apple its highest rating in late winter, when it notched a value score of 70 on a scale of -100 to 100 (a score of zero means that people are giving equal amounts of positive and negative feedback about a brand). But its score began to fall shortly after and, despite brief rallies, hovers around 12.4 today.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has risen from near zero in early February to a value-perception score of 46.2.

The real test, of course will be actual sales data, and we won’t see anything resembling official numbers for this period until several months from now. But for the record, tracking service NPD says that overall PC sales dropped seven percent in the first three months of this year, while Apple’s Mac shipments dropped 1.8 percent.

Here’s the Microsoft ad starring “Lauren,” which kicked off the latest campaign:

And here’s Apple’s sort-of response:

The company plans on announcing the details of the reorg tomorrow, but here’s the most important one: The reshuffling won’t result in any layoffs, a person familiar with the situation tells me.

That’s nice for Condé’s employees, who already went through cuts last fall. But it’s also puzzling: If merging all of Condé’s Web operations into one group doesn’t eliminate a single redundancy, then what does it do?

Perhaps not that much. AdAge’s Nat Ives, whom Condé briefed on the move, explains the upshot:

Some things also stay the same. Condé Nast Digital will handle day-to-day contact with digital advertisers, but the Condé Nast Media Group retains the lead on most relationships. The magazines’ high-powered publishers aren’t getting any new incentives to sell digital. And everyone remembers that print still brings in almost all the revenue; digital absorbed at least its fair share of staff cuts that concluded 2008.

But Condé Nast executives point to the recession to explain why it’s finally found religion. ‘This economic experience that we are going through has sobered us up considerably,’ [Condé Nast CEO Charles] Townsend said. ‘To get back to double-digit growth, we have to put our digital assets to work hard. I am hoping that the print business will recover to double-digit growth, but I am convinced that the digital business will grow exponentially.’”

The problem here is that unlike Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc, Condé only has a few properties, liked Wired.com, that have enough scale to attract digital advertisers. Most of the ones associated with magazine titles, like Gourmet.com, VanityFair.com, etc., are simply too small to register.

And as long as Condé remains a magazine publisher that happens to have some Web properties, it’s hard to see how that will change.

For those not following this sordid tale, the hot social-networking site stumbled badly in its handling of a new ad product that broadcasts your purchases from external Web sites back to your Facebook news feed.

Facebook has had to backpedal a lot on Beacon, including issuing an apology last week for it from Founder Mark Zuckerberg.

In the wake of Beacon’s dimming (sort of), clever Simon thought up some more ideas for the feckless Facebookers, such as Facebook Questioning:

Writes Dumenco:

Are you a closeted homosexual in a small Southern town? Facebook Questioning will automatically suggest to those friends and colleagues who are able to ‘read between the lines’ that maybe you’re ‘questioning’ your sexuality. It does this by comparing Beacon data with thresholds of what’s considered ‘normal’ heterosexual behavior by marketers. ‘The purchase by an unmarried, middle-aged male of more than two movie-musical soundtracks or DVDs per quarter doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s gay,’ says a Facebook veep. ‘But it will raise a rainbow-colored flag within our algorithm and might even help certain in-denial Facebook users with their own voyage of self-discovery.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld says a lot below: