Have we reached the limits to time and space? When people spend 96 percent of their waking day with media, is there any room for growth? The answer: maybe. Joe Mandese reports. A couple of years ago, when satellite TV company DirecTV broke into the broadband Internet marketplace, it ran a clever, eye-catching TV commercial. The ad, called "The End" and created by Deutsch LA, showed an average Joe sitting in front of his PC surfing the Web, when the screen suddenly prompts him with a startling message: "Congratulations, you've reached the end of the Internet. You have seen …

Some years ago, when big media shops began dabbling with optimizers, I asked media guru Erwin Ephron why agencies needed high-powered computers to do what media buyers and planners had always done. His reply: "There are too many options for a human being to process." When I asked him how many options there were, he said, "Let me think about that. I'll get back to you." Several days later, and after consulting with a mathematician friend of his, Ephron came back with a number that astounded me: "The number of options is 1.125, followed by 12 zeros." For those …

Until recently, paid media operated in splendid isolation from the outside world. It was a fair-weather form of communication designed to shine a positive light on advertisers, under conditions that were business as usual. But in recent years, crises that left consumers feeling vulnerable and uncertain have repeatedly intruded on marketing relationships. With reality banging on the door, it's time to consider what to do when business is not as usual. To get a handle on this issue, we need to distinguish between endogenous and exogenous crises. Endogenous crises arise from within a specific company or industry and have …

Are purveyors of branded entertainment the new "hidden persuaders"? On the cover of the 1971 paperback edition (42nd printing) of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, a juicy red apple dangles from a giant fish-hook. The image says it all, but just in case, the back cover copy drives Packard's thesis home: "This book tells why your children like cereals that crackle and crunch...why men think of a mistress when they see a convertible in a show window...why men wouldn't give up shaving even if they could." Packard was a pop sociologist, the '60s version of today's Malcolm …

Ah, our beautiful state parks: Birds a-warblin', brooks a-babblin', suns a-settin'. Oh, and hard drives a-whirrin'. Beg your pardon? California, Michigan, and Texas, among other states, have tapped wireless behemoths like SBC to equip many of their parks with Wi-Fi hookups. Whereas nature aficionados used to have to make do with a compass and waterproof matches, they can now use their laptops to access weather forecasts, emergency alerts, and online poker sites. Though some might squawk that technology has invaded one of the modern world's few remaining sanctuaries, a California State Parks spokesperson says reaction …

Soon there will come a day when we will sit back on our collective couches and reminisce about the time when our trusty television remote controls were used simply to change the channel. Because in the very near future, the remote control will take on a whole new role in the lives of the American consumer, thanks to the ever-expanding world of television commerce. Advances in technology will soon allow lazy consumers to use their remote controls to purchase items featured on television without picking up the phone or surfing the Net. Abbreviated as t-commerce, this new frontier in …

Reading the New York Times recently, I was very happy to learn that I could vote for my favorite new flavor of Crest toothpaste. Brilliant. My vote could make the difference between the commercialization of Lemon Ice versus Tropica Exotica. So imagine my disappointment when, just as I was preparing to register, I read that I was going to receive follow up e-mails to remind me how important it was to vote every day. Oh, dear. Why isn't once enough? Why can't I just go, vote, have fun, and move on? Do I really need to be drawn into an …

I almost didn't make it into media. Yep, I - who decided at age 16 that advertising was the career for me, who narrowed my pursuit of a personal calling to media planning during my sophomore year of college, and who subsequently did everything possible to learn about and get experience in the media industry - nearly didn't land in the sacred media waters at all. The reason? Those who recruited advertising people for a living didn't think I was right for a job in media. Specifically, it was the Leo Burnett Company, by far my No. 1 choice …

I'm sorry, I know all this new technology is changing everything, but people need a place to go to find programming, especially for new programming. 'Desperate Housewives' never would have become what it did without a network backing it, and people being able to find it on cable. People need a destination to find programming in an organized way." That's according to one of the leading, and for my money, one of the smartest cable executives in America. It's a provocative point. And, she adds, "People just don't want to work that hard." But here's a set …

My response to John Wanamaker's quip about not knowing which half of advertising is wasted: I don't care which half is wasted; I want to know what my sales per advertising dollar are. There's a lot of buzz these days about return on investment (ROI) on marketing expenditures. ROI is the new evolution - or revolution - in the offline world. But one group, namely direct marketers, was squarely centered on ROI long before the Internet began. ROI means different things to different people. I don't know why a simple concept like return on investment should require apocryphal interpretation. …