Statement: Digital media advertising technologies will allow for unprecedented targeting. Question: Targeting of what and to what end? It's true that these technologies are improving daily in their ability to refine targeting based on context and consumer's behavioral data, but targeting can only serve to improve advertising's effectiveness when combined with an advertising plan that fully accounts for the abilities and limitations of targeting technologies.

So you know about the term "Net Generation," right? For those of you who might not, it is anyone between the ages of 16 and 29. This group has grown up with Internet technology being a part of everyday life. If you are trying to target this group demographically, tread lightly and have a solid strategy.

Last week Google's recently acquired Feedburner, one of the leaders in RSS syndication and a darling of the blogosphere, quietly announced it would begin offering a number of premium services for free. Among them -- the new "Reach" metric, which, according to Feedburner, is the total number of people who have actually taken action -- viewed or clicked -- on the content in a feed. It's similar to the difference between knowing how many subscribers a magazine has, and then how many people actually pull it out of the recycling bin and read or interact with it. Quite important!

The biggest news in the online ad industry this week has been Nielsen/Net Ratings' announcement that it is changing its most important Web media measurement metric, replacing the page view with time spent. The new regime for one of the two primary online media measurement companies is going to shift the focus away from how many pages users view to how long they are viewing online content instead.

Like many of my nerdy counterparts over the last two weeks, I stood in line last week to pick up my new Apple iPhone -- but rest easy knowing that while this phone is cool and probably my favorite gadget ever, I'm not going to be writing about it today. Nope; I'm here to ask about YouTube, because the iPhone is outfitted with a YouTube player built into the interface, and last week LG also announced plans to create a YouTube-enabled mobile phone that allows users to watch, create and upload videos directly from their handsets. YouTube is becoming its …

Try finding a media or advertising article these days that doesn't in some way end up at Murdoch's doorstep. It's like media's version of "6 degrees of Kevin Bacon," except it's only one degree for Rupert. Take your pick of hot subjects: Newspaper's digital shift. The eroding value of the 30-second spot. The sky-rocketing popularity of social networks. The resurgence of traditional and digital media M&A activity. And of course, all of these culminating in a singular issue: the social media sea change.

I've written a lot about this in the past and it's still a hot topic: social networking. Many advertisers and brand marketers come to my team asking if they should be advertising on social networks. Most of the time my answer is no.

Have you ever been on an awesome thrill ride at an amusement park, had your photo, with a big grin on your face, taken unsuspectingly -- only to end the ride with an aggressive pitch to buy a low-quality print for, say, $5, $10, $15, even $20? It's happened to me countless times, and always left a sour feeling in my stomach. While such establishments risk the appearance of ripping off or actually offending customers, they're simultaneously blowing major promotional and loyalty-building opportunities. Those photos are documentary evidence of brand enjoyment. And in the hands of happy, …

Finally, the Web is permitting consumers to personalize their Web experiences in ways beyond just the historical "check-box personalization." Now, users can not only fill their personal browsing pages with widgets of every favorite type of content or application, but they can open those pages to their friends, or the Web at large, and share that same browsing experience with many, many others. This notion, that Web users are not only personalizing their own browsing experience, but that they can proactively share it with others, is likely to bring some very significant changes to the online advertising industry.

I love movies. And, I love the Internet. Typically I waste some of my time watching movie trailers online, and just like most people I know, I'm eagerly anticipating the third installment of the superb Bourne seriess, "The Bourne Ultimatum." As it turns out, this movie is breaking ground on many levels, more for its marketing than anything else, because for the first time I can recall, Google is launching a campaign that is not text-based search!