Every day, online retailers are forced to wonder why they couldn't close the deal with customers who leave items orphaned in their shopping carts. Was there a problem with the site? Confusion about the shipping costs? Did they just go to grab a sandwich and never come back?

When Facebook's director of sales in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Blake Chandlee, presented at IAB Spain's conference recently, he said in order to generate new demand for products, marketers need to move up the consumer funnel. "The power of the social graph is changing the discovery process," he said.

With over 75 percent of consumers now having picture messaging capabilities on their phones, visual recognition advertising has been a hot topic of late, enabling companies to launch a virtual conversation with their target consumer via traditional media. Through mobile activation, companies have found a way to not only deliver a wide range of brand content, but open an actual dialogue with the consumer.

Aaron Smith and Lisa Harmon are regulars at MediaPost's Email Insider Summit, where they appeared again this past December. But this time, they found themselves more in the limelight and receiving a few more huzzahs than usual.

In a move that can be likened to man's first step on the moon, Burberry has ventured into social networking, launching TheArtoftheTrench.com. Seriously, this is a big deal -- at least in the world of luxury brands, which have resisted mingling with common folk on the Internet. But Burberry is diving into the trenches with a site that celebrates its iconic trench coat.

How many ad networks on one media plan are too many? If you are running a performance-based campaign, the answer may be two. Does that sound crazy? After all, it's pretty common today to see online media plans that have six, seven, 10 or even more networks on the plan. Media planners include multiple networks with the idea that they will optimize the plan over time by dropping the weakest performers. The problem with this strategy is that planners (and clients, for that matter) rarely have the data and analytics to make the right decisions, while the networks do everything …

Hamlet asked, "To be or not to be?" Advertisers have to ponder "To bid or not to bid?" - on their own name. And it is the question brand managers have the most trouble answering. Sometimes bidding on your own name is a smart idea, other times it just does not make sense. The answer must be considered in the context of many, often unrelated, factors.

It's no surprise that people spent less on gifts this holiday season, but a somewhat surprising Nielsen survey reveals that of those dollars being spent, even less went online. Bargain hunting is the norm during the holiday season, and this year it seems that shoppers used the Web more to compare and contrast than to purchase.

Call it anthropomorphism, or more accurately, call it a lucrative market. Dog owners are a marketer's best friend - even when the task at hand isn't pushing pet products. Despite their high maintenance, dogs remain the most popular pet in the United States, with 45.6 million households owning 77.5 million canines, according to the American Pet Products Association's 2009/2010 National Pet Owners Survey. They're a spendy bunch, forking over an estimated $45.4 billion in 2009. The lion's share of that goes to food, but the APPA expected spending on general supplies and over-the-counter medications to total $10.2 billion.

Vertical ad networks once promised deeper service based on transparency, so-called "expert" knowledge of niche audiences, and a more effective way to reach users than the big horizontal networks. But have they delivered?