If an advertiser wants to use online advertising to get a message in front of women 21-49 with kids, and to reach 70% of them at least three times, the tools exist to enable that. I can't think of a single good reason to discourage the practice.

As someone who came out of traditional media and who believes its members have a good understanding of what clients want and need, I am always astounded by the question of the validity of using GRPs for a Web metric. But then I back off and remind myself that there is a whole generation of advertising people who are from the Web era with no background in traditional. The answer is yes, of course. Why? Let me count the ways.

A question any practitioner of Internet-based analytics will be asked by many different stakeholders is, "Why don't the numbers match?" Counts of the identically named metrics from ad servers don't match the Web analytics tool, which don't match the for-pay third-party audience measurement tools, which don't match the free audience measurement tools, which never match any of the homegrown internal measurement tools. And none of them ever match each other.

When I started as an Internet marketing strategist back in 1993, I was usually asked, "Jim, can we really make money online?" I would lead clients through their Web awakening, explaining that the Internet is a communication tool and could be used to contact customers from awareness (advertising) to education (marketing) to transactions (sales) and solving problems (customer service). During the next few years, the question was, "Jim, how do we make our Web site better?" My immediate response was, "Better at what? What are you trying to accomplish?"

I think there are two things that we can expect to see driving adoption of mobile-based Internet access over the next five years: demography and technology.With respect to demography, a colleague of mine who until recently was a college professor tells me that overwhelmingly, the platform of media choice for 18- to 24-year-olds -- based on her observation of the university population -- is the phone With respect to technology, consider the impact of the iPhone, not yet a year old. According to M:Metrics, fully 88% of iPhone users access news, information or entertainment content via mobile handset.

"Social media metrics" is a huge buzz phrase lately -- but does anyone REALLY know what it means? Can you define it? The social media space covers a broad set of channels: widgets, blogging, social applications, micro-blogging and more. Each one of these segments, and their associated vendors, are reporting on and introducing new metrics associated with their platform, which some Web analytics tools may or may not be able to tap into. This leaves the marketer in the Web 2.0 space struggling to determine how to integrate and correlate (and reconcile) metrics being reported across all of these media. …

At a recent conference, there was renewed conversation about the clickthrough. The MRC is very far along on standardization of this metric, yet agencies feel that it is dead from a relevance standpoint. They feel the way this hallowed metric is being used harms the campaigns it is purporting to measure. How can this be true? Read on.

Last month, Hula (a joint venture between NBC and Fox) attracted nearly 2.5 million unique viewers (presumably defined by distinct cookies), who streamed content an average of more than 20 times each! That's a bigger, more engaged audience than many cable stations draw in a month's time. All this is causing pre-revolution heartburn in the media departments of major ad agencies today. They're trying to figure out which metrics best equate clicks (or streams) to GRiPs (gross rating points), so they can compare the costs of advertising online to advertising on TV. Apples-to-apples. Wrong mission.

Next month I'm on a keynote panel at the Advertising Research Foundation's third annual Audience Measurement Symposium (AM 3.0), titled "The TV/Video Audience Measurement Challenge." I've been thinking a lot about video lately, and talking about video with interactive agencies, traditional agencies, major TV companies porting their content online, and pure-play Internet companies expanding into video. I've come to believe that video is perhaps the most important development in the online metrics space, and that the rapid rise in importance of video will be -- and for many, has already been -- a game-changer.

You've worked hard to let people in your organization know that there is this great tool called Web analytics that can give them great intelligence about the workings of the Web site, great leaps forward in optimizing campaign ROI and great insight into the hearts and minds of the marketplace. They appear interested, but only a handful reach out to ask for data. And what do they want? Hits reports. You become the person that cranks out reports instead of the person who provides valuable insights.