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Erasing the name Cingular off the face of the earth is no easy job, especially after investing millions to raise high blue bars at every corner. The wireless carrier’s ads were ubiquitous before evaporating in an instant. Well, perhaps AT&T is feeling some remorse for killing off Cingular, so it’s promoting the creation of new names to express the strength of their cellular. Such is the case with New Sanfrankota*, a place somewhere between New York, San Francisco and the Dakotas, or Kantukornia*, where Kansas, Kentucky and California “meet.”

For their new Where Do You Live campaign, AT&T collects your submissions–via a simple and clean Flash interface at www.attwheredoyoulive.com–and quickly makes fun merchandise available for purchase including shirts, mugs, bags, and stickers, all featuring the name of your new place and it’s motto.  Its a fantastic example of 360 degree online branding; you create their promotional items and then pay for the right to display them!

* Click here for specific directions to San Frankota and Kantukornia, some errant traveler in our company might have already visited there.

After a debate that lasted until Thursday last week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission cleared Google’s proposed $3.1 billion takeover of DoubleClick, opening the door for the Internet giant’s entry into the multibillion-dollar online display advertising market.

The FTC, which voted 4-1 to close its 8-month investigation, said the deal is “unlikely to substantially lessen competition.” But the transaction still faces European antitrust scrutiny, and Google said it cannot close the deal until that final hurdle is passed.

The deal here? According to an eMarketer report from October 2006 [PDF], display advertising is expected to grow to $4.5 billion by 2010 (from $3.34 billion last year). Meanwhile, Paid Search advertising accounted for $6.76 billion of online ad spending in 2006 and was projected to grow to $10.3 billion by 2010. DoubleClick represents the third biggest display advertising inventory in the industry.

For us, this means there could be an important integration between leading online advertising platforms (display + search), which at the end will facilitate the execution and analysis of cross-platform campaigns, and also one point of negotiation for almost all.