I’m writing today about something that has been stuck in my craw for a while. This weekend, talking to a pal in the business, the concept solidified. I'm mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

Customer acquisition is one of the major building blocks for a business, but it's not the only one. Advertisers spend most of their money advertising to potential new customers, but what they fail to realize is that customer acquisition comprises most of the battle.

“Don’t create problems. Create solutions.” - Unnamed Ad Exec. This is another old quote that one of my first mentors told me. It applies in many situations, and in this case we’re going to talk about it in terms of online advertising.

It was all triggered by a cute story. The Milk Board had awarded FCB the account in Chicago, supposedly because they painted their beautiful wood-paneled boardroom with Ben & Jerry-like landscape scenes of dairy cows. Suddenly, everyone considered himself a brilliant pitch strategist. The gimmicks flowed.

There is a lot of relationship shifting in the online agency world. Client-agency relationships aren’t so much “marriages” as they are dates who “go steady.” Heck, a lot of agency relationships are one-night stands.

Here is an exercise that I think it would behoove each of us to undertake… Put down that piece of paper and stop typing for a moment. Please take a deep breath and then explain in 3 sentences or less what is interactive advertising?

How you can leave a client meeting without feeling like you just sold your soul for a handful of silver.

Are cross media deals dead? Or is it just too early to do them? Did the media planners cause the death of multimedia deals by demanding too much specificity? Does the changing of the guard at AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal recently mean that the cross media deal is dead? Lots of questions and nobody seems to have any answers. But that’s why we’re here, to take a shot at it.

The dot com industry spawned its share of buzzwords and buzz phrases that can no longer be used in casual conversation without eliciting a groan and a roll of the eyes – "paradigm," "push technology," "outside the box." The last time I was able to talk about these things outside of the context of a joke was in 1998 or so. There's another phrase I'd like to see go the way of the dinosaurs – "Crisis of Confidence."

What kind of agency are you? Are you an "Interactive" agency? Are you a "Traditional" agency? Are you a "Direct Response" shop? Are you "Integrated?"