There was a time in the history of this business, as short as it is, when we were transitioning from the dot-communistas pouring garbage trucks full of money into parking lots outside of web publishers’ offices to a more reasonable, albeit panicky, quest for dollars from general market advertisers. It could be argued that that is a transition still in progress. I would argue that it is over, and now it is a matter of depth and volume on the part of the general market advertiser. However…

An old mentor of mine once said, “If you want to know the future of online advertising, visit gaming sites and porn sites.” I never really agreed with him on this “observation” (I think he just had a lot of free time), but recently I noticed the gaming sites are indeed doing their jobs better than the majority of the online publishers.

Direct response ads won't be fleeing the web anytime soon, even if brand advertising picks up next year.

I could not help but notice the trend these past several weeks in print vehicles covering the Internet and the “new economy.”

We have written before about the value of online media optimization. For most media, planning has the most clout, closely followed by buying. While we have been evaluating optimizers for what seems like years, it all came to a head for me last week.

I wish it weren’t true. The 4As takeover of the electronic media buying efforts of the now-defunct MediaPort will fail as predictably as the well-intentioned efforts of MediaPort’s big agency parent companies.

It is true, people. As it turns out, this Internet advertising thing isn’t a fluke. It is a real business with real people doing real things and making real money.

Did you know that Yogi Berra was a genius? Yogi not only played for my beloved New York Yankees, but he also foresaw the issues that would face us in 2002 in the Online Advertising space. Let us reflect for a moment…

Over the years, the Interactive advertising industry has had to make several concessions to clients and agency folk in order to make the medium more palatable to traditional taste buds. At times, I’ve felt as if these concessions were selling the medium short.

Recently we were discussing search with a client. I guess that Google has done a good job in his sector, because he opined that he could not imagine anybody in his target audience not using Google. Well, good for Google, but with all due respect, that ain’t the way it is.