Staying true to their mission of hyping all things interactive, the IAB this week managed to convince just about everyone who attended their Advertisers Forum that the Internet, if used correctly in a media mix, produces fantastic results. Naturally, skeptics and realists walked away pondering why traditional marketers are not exactly buying the "spend more online" story, but most agreed that the Web future is very bright.

The second day of the IAB's Advertisers Forum is slightly less crowded than yesterday was, and there seem to be more people schmoozing in the lobby and in the exhibit hall than there are listening to the various panel presentations, but the conversations are just as spirited.

The big announcement of the first day of the first annual IAB Advertisers Forum is that the Ford Motor Company has just become the newest Cross Media Optimization Study participant.

Here's an interesting opinion on spam, or at least one that attracted my attention this morning as I was in the process of deleting 563 (yes, I counted) weekend spam messages from my inbox.

What did people do online during the last few weeks of summer? Looks like quite a few were looking for a new job.

A couple of fun things to report on today. First, if you haven't already, go to the MSN homepage and check out the Ford ad. Part of the automaker's $200 million push for the F-150 pickup, Ford is taking over the front pages of MSN, Yahoo and AOL, but only the MSN takeover ad was cool enough for this cynic to replay it.

Children are our future, and the future holds about $172 billion in spending money.

Here's a relative success story and something to keep in mind for next summer's media plans: car rental websites. Nielsen//NetRatings reports that more than 4.5 million consumers logged on to car rental brand websites from home and work in July 2003. As the Labor Day weekend approached many travelers were looking to rental cars as an alternative way to travel during the last weekend of summer.

Back to School shopping is in the full swing and it looks like the Apparel category is doing quite well online (minus a brief slowdown due to the East Coast blackout.)

If you're an email marketer, this week was probably one for the books. The virus that's going around clogging up inboxes around the world has made just about every email user very "delete-happy."