• by Jim Meskauskas , July 8, 2004

There is a parable that I came across long ago; maybe I read it somewhere. Or perhaps I dreamed it. Or maybe I overheard it at a parable cocktail party. Maybe it isn't exactly a parable, but it is an anecdote of sorts, a simple story illustrating a moral. Which is what a parable is, I guess.

The story goes something like this:

A traveler comes upon a fishing village. He has come at a time of year when no schools were running along the coastline (of fish, I mean ... schools of fish), so the industry of the village was silent. The traveler asks a local "What does everyone do when the fish aren't running."

The local said, "We take this time to mend our nets and repair our boats. We work on casting and find new ways to make our catches."

This is to say, they readied themselves for when the season changes and brings the currents that carry with them the fish to once again be harvested. The inhabitants of the fishing village prepared for the time when the seas off their shore were no longer barren, when the cycle turned and they could once again go about their livelihoods.

It is important to note here that those whose skill it is to cast nets are not the same as those whose skill it is to mend them. The best boat captains aren't necessarily the best repairmen and builders. Depending on the season and the task at hand, different skill sets are needed.

During the market downturn, this business had an excellent opportunity to do this kind of thing. Different artisans and craftspeople all had time to hone up on their skills. A few outfits took advantage of this, most notably the Interactive Advertising Bureau with the release of the first cross-media optimization study, or before that, the very first rich media guidelines way back when in '01.

But mostly, the industry didn't spend any time mending its nets or pitch-patching its boats.

We are still stuck with a stinking pile of old chum that has never been dealt with. For instance:

Reach and Frequency; we're still talking about this. Folks need to get a handle on whether or not this is important and then do something about it. Though I realize that it is being addressed among the inner cabal of research, but shouldn't we have this figured out by now? What is really the hold up?

I used some of the tools out there, most notably Atlas DMT's tool. I've looked at the others, but they calculate potential R/Fs the same way one would do it in Print (percent of a site's composition of the target multiplied by the percentage of total available impressions the buy is equal to). Atlas's tool seems to do the best job of taking real-world data to calculate a potential reach and frequency. However, the numbers usually come out showing that online gets a CPP much like TVs. Maybe this is the reason for the hold up?

Terms and Conditions: I don't really want to say anything about these. I wrote about this subject last month (https://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_Spin.cfm?SpinId=253786&archive=os). Let's just say that this baby needs to be put to bed so that it can grow up big a strong.

Impression Count and, thus, reconciliation issues: This is by far the most egregious hole left without a patch. Sites, ad servers, and the MRC (Media Research Council) need to really figure this one out. How bad does it look that an industry some ten-years old still can't identify with certainty its own currency? Now, I heard that a committee was convened to determine whether or not a committee needed to be convened, but let's get some action here. It's hard to catch fish when you don't know what a fish looks like...

There was so much time when this business was conducting little business, it might have been a good idea to take advantage of that down time and figure out just what kind of nets we should be using and mending the ones we already had that seemed to work.