I find it odd, now that we live in a world in which it’s relatively trivial to ascertain actual performance on the advertiser’s site, that more and more media sellers are shying away from CPA deals and instead falling back on the bad old CPC.

I’ve had more than one discussion with very knowledgeable media and marketing professionals in this space who aren’t convinced that reach/frequency really matters when discussing online advertising. I disagree that reach & frequency have no place in determining values of online marketing. The reason I do believe in R/F as being one of the fundamental pieces missing from the interactive puzzle is this:

Paid Search Results are all the rage in online marketing these days and for very good reason -- they work. That being said, who owns the rights to these search services?

Back in my traditional advertising days, it was not uncommon for me to submit a prototypical plan to my supervisor, and have her say to me, “That’s great. Let me see what reach at the 3+ frequency level looks like if you use six radio networks instead of five.” Think for a second about how much of a headache a similar scenario would be in interactive media.

I believe that clients ought to be evaluating their media services (and other agency services) based on a concept I will call TCS or total cost of service. Here's what I mean.