It seems we’ve gotten to the heart of the issue surrounding the latest round of lawsuits against behavioral marketing company Gator. In my opinion, the issue is one of publisher control over consumer’s desktops. It seems that publishers involved in the suit think they should have ultimate control over how their websites are displayed to consumers. This view makes absolutely no sense to me. Why are these publishers picking on Gator exclusively?

Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, I’m pretty sure the last thing you’ll be looking for in this article is me bringing up things that need to be addressed to improve our industry. Instead I thought I’d have a little fun and recognize some of the things that our industry has brought to me over the years… my own little Industry Thanksgiving.

In discussions with senior media and management personnel at top agency and media shops at last week's @dTech, a startling trend came to light. Major advertisers are asking and getting bids on Interactive media efforts at 1-3% commission from major Interactive agencies and media agencies.

Certain types of companies have always been easier to convince to test the online waters. It shouldn’t be surprising that these companies are the ones that were first able to sell their wares online. But there remains a secluded category of IP that spends billions of dollars in advertising, yet fails to allow its wares to be delivered electronically.

Howdy, folks. I’m going to try and be short and sweet this week. @d:Tech has now come and gone. Any of you reading MediaPost publications regularly will have some sense of what it was like based on Masha Geller’s daily coverage. But let me add a bit.

Back to the issue of advertising being art vs. science for a just a moment… Traditional scientific testing requires the establishment of a control, isolation of variables, development of a hypothesis and a statistically significant sample size for definition of a confidence level that is high enough to warrant the analysis of an outcome. But how much is enough?

Having been in close contact with many publishers, buy-side colleagues, marketers and industry analysts, I can say that it looks as if the interactive business is beginning to experience a rebirth of sorts. This time, the spoils belong to the smart ones who can make it work, and not the hypesters who pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes in the first go round.

It seems like, everywhere I go, I am asked about Web Reach & Frequency. Now, I have certainly set myself up for this, having written about it for several years, by my involvement with the ARF Online R&F Standards Committee and participation in industry meetings and through various speaking engagements. Not that I mind the questions. This issue is near and dear to me and I can give you an hour on it if we could find the time. But in this case, I’ll try to limit it to a page or two.

A billion dollars spent on political ads, and during a midterm to boot. In a different column, I’d rail against the pollution of money in politics, but today I’d like to explore why the online markets got practically none of it.

Many of the campaigns we see today are not taking advantage of the true nature of the web. The web is all about bringing together groups of like-minded individuals and allowing them to share information and interact. The web is self-publishing gone wild, where anyone can say anything to anyone at anytime. The campaigns today seem to ignore these capabilities of the web in favor of tonnage and mass reach (funny since back in the old days no one thought the web would become a mass medium).