With traditional mass marketing losing effectiveness amid splintering audiences and rising costs, "viral marketing" has somehow seeped into our veins as an answer to the problem. Imagine that: a low-cost strategy whereby everyone embraces your insatiable commercial message as credible, and infects everyone they know. Then, those infected people infect everyone they know, and so on and so on. Hey, it's almost free marketing! Who needs traditional anymore? We do.

There's been a lot of talk over the past two months about "softening" growth in the online display ad marketplace. Destination Web sites and portals, accustomed over the past year or two to 25-40% year-over-year revenue growth in their display ad revenues, found themselves facing flat or moderate year-over-year increases this past quarter. While the second quarter continued to deliver explosive growth at Google, the other search players, and many of the online ad networks, for some reason many of the destination sites were left behind. What happened? Should we all be surprised? Is the online display ad market really …

Are you investing in online video platforms? If so, you may be missing a crucial piece of information that can be of key importance. It seems every venture capitalist and holding company is investing in online video platforms without a true understanding of the challenges and issues facing scalability. I've done a tremendous amount of research into the space, and from what I can tell, there are no current tools for dynamically serving third-party video ads into online video content!

Last week's discussion of how, in social media, "the publisher is the consumer," begged the eternal question: So what? One answer to this question is that the emergence of pull advertising markets will have immediate practical effects on creative development. The notion that social media advertising content must create value for the publisher/consumer to be effective has been discussed at length here in previous posts, but in recent conversations one analogy has seemed to hit the mark better than any other: The future of ad creative in pull markets resides in advertisers' ability to adapt the rules of fashion.

I was impressed by the perspective of a study recently released by MTV and Nickelodeon, in association with Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. The companies did a global study to find out how kids and young adults interact with digital technology.The ah-hah finding was that friends are as important as brands. You might have to think about that for a minute. I did. Friends influence each other as much as marketers do

Freakonomics, the addictive blog examining the "hidden-side-of-everything," just partnered with The New York Times, moving under the flagship brand's online and editorial umbrellas. Congrats to the coauthors, celebrity economist Stephen Levitt, and his articulate sidekick Stephen Dubner. Freakonomics is a pioneer and its move into the NYTimes underscores the value and importance of niche, blog-format content in 21st-century publishing, not to mention lively, opinionated content.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal ran a great feature on John Chambers and Cisco. The focus of the piece was Chamber's vision that the future of Cisco was not just as a provider of "plumbing" for network communication, its business today, but actually developing and selling many of the devices and services that use networked communication. His vision, apparently, is that someday Cisco could be a major force in consumer electronics. I have a different idea. Maybe Cisco is the next Dow Jones.

A change is gonna come, or it might even be here already! It would appear, based on all the news articles and stories of the last two weeks that the agency business is changing and finally responding to the shift towards automation and a digital-centric focus for planning. Those of us who've been in this part of the industry since the beginning have foretold these changes for many years, and now it seems our predictions are beginning to come true,

Pull advertising is a necessity of distributed media advertising. As media have continued to fragment, I have seen arguments for Webs site publishers to play an active role in pulling the advertising content most appropriate for their site/audience. I have also seen arguments that the users viewing the advertisement are the most appropriate source of advertisement pull (after all, they are the end consumers). But, when the those publishing the content are also the target consumers for a given brand, such as is the case in social media, then the necessity of pull is enhanced exponentially.

Hello, dear readers. I sit here banging away at my keyboard with my head spinning yet again. I said it a couple of weeks ago, and unfortunately I have the same sentiment this week: What the hell is up with our industry? There is so much money being spent on big acquisitions. I'm having a hard time figuring out who owns what these days -- or who works for whom, for that matter.