Jim's "One last kick..." last week elicited a few more kicks from y'all, including Marcelo Salup from Foote Cone & Belding with: I love the ideas of GRP's (and TRP's) on the web. 1. This will allow planners to mix the web more actively with other media (we can use GRP/TRP's on any medium) giving "new" media a broader playing field. 2. Should make costs more comparable. 3. Will contribute to merging new-media-agencies and traditional media agencies into one single unit: the media agency (forget new, old or middle aged!). (Can you imagine if, 15 years ago, someone had specialized …

Jim throws another log into this smoldering fire that many of you kept burning all last week. Josh Chasin of Warp Speed Marketing added "One common theme that has emerged from the Internet ad community almost since day one has been, a desire to have research comparable to traditional media, so that advertisers and agencies buying across media can better understand (and begin to shift money toward) Internet advertising." And continued with... "By zooming past vehicle audience measurement to actual impressions as the unit of buy/sell currency, I believe that the Internet has made it more difficult for commerce …

Last week Tig's look at unmet agency promises garnered both comments and suggestions on the Spin Board. Thom King of Multimediary offered this tip - "...We have hit quite a few brick wall because of other agencies blunders. I recently addressed this in a pitch to Playboy by offering a surety bond equal to the value of the promotion that would insure the promotion is executed by what was promised in the term sheet. This worked out well." Add your $0.02 to this discussion, or to weigh-in on today's topic click the button below.

Wow, more than 20 of you joined in the lively discussion from last week's "Leave the impression alone" thread. Jeff Voigt, from JWT Detroit, said "...I am not that concerned about getting to standards so that everyone can plan and buy the web like other media. One of the great strenghts of the web is it's openess and flexibility. While standards certainly helped TV, it has been the historic impact of TV that has caused it's success, and now present it's vulnerability. The opportunity for the internet is in the dramatically falling prices across the spectrum of creative executions, and …

In the December 3rd issue of MediaDailyNews, David Smith, President of Mediasmith, proposed a contrary perspective on the recent call for an end of the impression as the sole currency for online advertising. He isn't alone in opposing this call. Just two days ago, my esteemed colleague Tom Hespos made a similar call. The reasons both of them use to convince us we should stick with the impression differ slightly: Mr. Smith says it's because the impression offers us a glimpse of the most granular level of activity in media so 'why should we give that up?' and …

I see the work of many agencies -be they ad agencies, direct agencies, PR agencies or the interactive type - suffering from a greater and greater deficit between what they say they offer clients and what their staff actually delivers. Maybe it's the effects of consolidation and the increased economies of scale in many industries' marketing budgets. Once the budget gets ludicrously large, it becomes unwieldy and is often spent in a fashion designed more for convenience than marketing effectiveness. Perhaps it's just the fact that a lot of …

The idea of an audience-based model for buying and selling online advertising has occupied center stage at industry conferences and opinion columns lately. I've recently changed my opinion on how this model should function within our industry, and I wanted to give my $0.02 worth in this first article for The Online Spin. There are quite a few industry opinion leaders calling for the end of the impression-based system we use now. They would like to replace it with a system that leverages the model that traditional media currently uses. I think this would be particularly damaging to the industry. …