I spend my days speaking with lots of advertisers. Some have fully embraced online advertising; others are just dipping their toes in the water. If you spend too much time with the former, you forget that the latter group is actually a lot bigger. The Web is a scary place for newcomers. Managing your first online campaign is like a having a baby: It's well-worth the effort, but far harder than you imagine. Plus, there's lots of crying. That's why you should know what to expect when you're expecting to go online.

I came across this quote the other day: "The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same." As marketers, our job is to make projections about the future and the role of advertising. So this quote hit home for me while working on a study, code name "Project Tiffany," designed to explore the future of online video by comparing traditional TV viewing to that of broadband video online.

This is the fourth big economic downturn I've experienced in my career. The S&L crisis, the 1987 stock market crash, the 2000 dot-com bust and today's lingering subprime crisis all offer hard lessons on how to do more than just cope - instead, how to creatively shift thinking to meet the economic challenges.

Over dinner one night, my colleague and I were discussing how things were going with his new company. His business, once based on development of mobile rich-media applications for businesses, was increasingly becoming a means of helping marketers execute their mobile marketing campaigns. While not a marketer by discipline, he made a rather grand sweeping statement about, or rather, an accusation of, our industry.