Jericho is now one of those words poised to make the pop culture leap from noun to verb, like "Google" or "Swiftboat." It will come to signify any aggressive online campaign to save a TV show with a small but intensely loyal audience.

Following the Oscar win for the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, television programmers are making room for the earth, both online and on-air. You could say green has become the new black. Consider:     

At Michael Eisner's Vuguru offices in Beverly Hills, anywhere from three to six interns spend all day, every day scouring the Internet for videos. They post the best, the most popular or the most interesting ones at Vuguru.com under a section titled "The Cream."

At the turn of the century, before Google launched AdWords, the paid search program that would make it one of the richest companies in the world, it had a back-up strategy for making a profit. Google's Plan B? Cut a deal with DoubleClick, then an ad network riding high on the first dot-com boom, to serve banner ads on its site.

Poor Google. It's so misunderstood, especially on Madison Avenue. In fact, do a Google search for the terms "Google" and "Madison Avenue" on Google and see what happens. Your screen will be filled with stories about angst, and a fair amount of fear and loathing.

Part of the allure of interactive advertising is that it's measurable. In fact, marketer demand for accountability is driving an increasing portion of ad dollars to interactive. But the stepped-up use of interactive also has affected offline ads. Now, offline often serves to ignite the relationship. In fact, it's difficult to find an offline ad that doesn't have a URL pushing consumers to branded Web sites.

Four years ago, few people had heard of MySpace, but by 2005, it was the new next. Then, it became the target of a corporation with ambitious plans to transform it. Now, it's a challenge for MySpace to be part of a huge corporation while still striving to remain cutting-edge. Unfortunately, it currently feels at best like the New Now; at worst, it's struggling to avoid becoming the New Last.

Merchandisers tend to favor promotional tactics such as discounts, store-wide sales and newspaper inserts, knowing these strategies deliver short-term returns. But brand marketers know discounts don't build equity, and suspect that over-reliance on discounts erodes differentiation, trains consumers to buy based on price and reduces margins over time. As a result, balancing short-term sales and long-term brand equity often results in organizational tug of war.

It's ironic that in the high-tech world of new media, the surest routes to success are both cheap and basic. The medium isn't the message anymore, and hasn't been for quite a while: It's the product that's the message, and the better that product is, the more people will talk about it.

I'm second-to-none in my appreciation for what Google has brought to the world. As CEO of washingtonpost.newsweek interactive, I was one of Google's first publishing partners when the company had no business model and I viewed search as a commodity. As a passionate consumer of information, I use Google a thousand times a day.