• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 12, 2011

Welcome to the new OMMA. Well, somewhat new, anyway. We're keeping our same focus - features, profiles and informational pieces for online and digital marketing insiders - but taking a new tack by focusing more thematically on a single subject. In this issue, it's the online display advertising marketplace.

You may also detect some changes in our design, as art director Nate Pollard and creative director Jonathan McEwan retool some of the visual elements to make OMMA more contemporary and more readable in a, well, digital age.

As for the theme of this issue, I can't think of a juicier subject to sink our minds into than online display advertising, which is undergoing a reinvention and revitalization as a result of new technology, new business models, new research and a new design orientation of its own. And it's about time. Online display advertising may still be one of Madison Avenue's youngest major media, but its perception, if not its reality, had until recently grown stodgy and has long been in need of a makeover.

Readers of the last few issues of OMMA have already noticed more of an emphasis on display as we stumbled across dynamic shifts remaking the art and science of brand advertising online. Take our recent cover story on the "Nouveau Riche" media platforms that are creating the kind of engaging, on-the-fly story-telling the ad industry had previously only dreamed about. Another recent cover feature profiled the new "Ad Savers" - people like AdKeeper's Scott Kurnit who are trying to shift the online ad paradigm from avoidance to sharing and preserving the most relevant advertising content.

 This issue carries that theme forward via an in-depth interview with AOL's Tim Amstrong that clears up the misconceptions surrounding Project Devil, and explains the real reason why the ad industry is getting behind its new portrait ad units and dynamic ad-serving platform. (Hint: It's not really about advertising per se, so much as about page design and user experience - with both ads and their adjacent content.)

Also in this issue, the inimitable Larry Dobrow tackles the subject of online advertising creative in a way that only he can, while former OMMA editor John Capone takes the opposite approach, with a somewhat skeptical view of the marketplace.

This issue has some other surprises, including a profile on Tynt, the largest collector of online user data that you've probably never heard of, and some solid looks into the display ad world's biggest players, including Yahoo and, yes, Facebook - which, according to the most recent data from eMarketer, has emerged as number one in ad dollar market share. And you thought it was the "social network.

So please read on, and let us know what you think. Also, stay tuned for some more fine-tuning in the issues to come. As always, it's joe@mediapost.com