• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, April 8, 2003

Let's take a moment... imagine a few things that would transform the way we do business and make our daily lives a much better place to live and work. The wonderful thing about the Internet is that if we can think up an idea, there is more than a slight chance what we come up with can be executed upon, so maybe this will serve as an opportunity for some growth in our fledgling industry.

What if...

1. There was one single tool for planning GRPs across all media that utilized a single standard for measuring an audience across multiple forms of media and multiple vehicles within said media. Imagine if this tool factored in duplication among media and behavioral patterns to weight the effectiveness of the advertising within these forms of media based on the attentiveness of the audience.

2. We decided that all advertising measurement would be based on one single standard counting methodology and all the publishers and third-party ad servers utilized this standard.

3. All advertisers allocated a proportionate percentage of their total advertising budgets to interactive media based on the percentage of the day that their target consumer spent online?

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4. Third party reporting actually was capable of reporting on all media in one centrally located place - the "Digital Dashboard" as one of my compatriots refers to it - rather than forcing us to use one tool for affiliates, one for search engine marketing, one for graphical elements, and excel to combine them all together in order to come to any holistic campaign conclusions?

5. Advertisers planned 3 months in advance (it will never happen, but we may as well start to imagine all the good ideas, right?).

6. All forms of media were as accountable as the Interactive space?

7. Inventory management tools on the publisher side actually allowed for advertisers to secure "right of first refusal" on campaigns and flagged the advertiser if someone else was interested in the inventory?

8. The week was made up of 8 days, with 27 hours per day, but we all got 2 hrs scheduled for lunch, and no one was allowed to work in those 2 hours.

I am sure that there are a number of other things to add to the wish list, as it were. What are some of yours?