Two government regulatory decisions publicized in November set significant new standards for incentivized online lead generation. They are the Florida Attorney General's voluntary compliance agreement with Azoogleads U.S. Inc. and the Federal Trade Commission's settlement with Adteractive Inc.

Recently, Walmart.com kicked off its "Customer Contact Reduction" program -- a quietly launched initiative to pull all customer service numbers from its Web site in an attempt to reduce costly inbound calls about order tracking. Instead of offering personal customer service, the retailer is forcing all of its online customers to rely on self-service tools to resolve questions and online customer service problems and denying access to phone support.

Is it just me -- or were there about 45 companies at Ad:Tech claiming to have a lead gen-network, the ability to target ads, have optimization, with both a publisher list and advertiser clients that would make the best of agencies drool? I wish I had a buck for everytime someone came up to me and asked "How do I tell the difference?" or "Can you give me 10 questions I should ask to help me find the good companies and weed out the brokers that aren't really bringing value to the table?"

Finding really good and scalable online lead generation opportunities for health care advertisers has long been a real challenge. Either the target audience was hard to find -- or the leads did not convert to par. But now comes a new platform that should define industry best practice in online performance-based advertising and lead generation.