Follow the money. That was the objective. And by all accounts there is a lot of it online. Too much to keep track of, maybe. You can see the money spent on a banner ad, sure, but that's not the whole story of where the money goes. To quote a well-known secret source: "It leads everywhere. Get out your notebook. There's more.... just follow the money."

By my third week of being tossed into the digital media/marketing/advertising salad, I felt as though I was discovering another language. And it seems it's often either unintentionally scatological or masturbatory in nature. I found myself in the audience of OMMA Behavioral NY in February listening in on a scintillating panel discussion of "punching the monkey." Now, I've heard of punching the clown, and spanking the monkey, but punching the monkey? And why is this fodder for a panel discussion?

Hearst Magazines Digital Media has partnered with Nokia to make your phone sing and dance - well, almost. Hearst's properties, including Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Esquire and Good Housekeeping, will now enable advertisers to reach target audiences on mobile Web sites through Nokia's Media Network. This partnership is the ultimate in symbiotic relationships, allowing Hearst Digital to access a vast mobile network while supplying Nokia with popular, credible content to entice users.

As podcasters proliferate, all these casts could end up leaving the view of millions of hooks in the digital ocean looking like one crowded, over-fished pier in a polluted Asbury Park estuary. However, an innovative advertising network built to accurately measure podcasting traffic is finding out who has the best bait.

Documentaries are nice, but who has the time to learn about China's emergence as an industrial power, when the spring line from Manolo Blahnik has yet to be perused? Powderhouse Productions, known for award-winning original series on the Discovery Channel and PBS, are finally using their mastery of multi-platform 360 video production to do something worthwhile: sell shoes. Shoetube.tv, which launched in February, provides a "central location online for women to connect, celebrate and share their love of shoes."

Who needs Google? Not search-marketing agency Outrider. It faced a challenge: Market products for Diageo's Smirnoff Progressive Adult Beverages using a comprehensive strategy, but do it without Google, which doesn't accept alcohol advertising.

Remember all those massages you got from mom as a baby? Well, if you're like me, probably not. The only tactile bond my mom made with me was a hug or a good slap on the behind when I hid my brother's underwear. Lucky for thousands of new babies, Johnson's has started a new advertising campaign to wise new moms up to the alleged healing powers of bonding through touch. On the microsite touchingbond.com, the company shows how its famous baby lotion can be used in a series of how-to videos directed toward new or expectant mothers. Broken down into …

An online press release with a hot-pink background trumpeted the imminent arrival of Dr. Kiumarse Zamanian to Glam Media in early February. The fluorescent color alone was enough to catch our attention, but Zamanian's transition to Glam, after a tenure at Yahoo that began in 2004, kept it. At Yahoo, Zamanian lead the new product team that oversaw the likes of targeting and predicting inventory for the advertisements featured on Yahoo. At Glam, he serves as vice president of Glam Evolution, which the company touts as the first-ever ad platform for premium inventory on all of the Internets. But no …

As the world gets smaller, so does the screen. A majority of Internet users - 55 percent - now watch TV on a device other than their TV sets. That could be a computer, a mobile phone, an iPod or some other digital media player (a few of those might even be Apple TVs). That number, culled from a ChoiceStream study late last year, will only get bigger.

Gone are the days when an advertiser was forced to choose between paying exorbitantly high CPMs for premium placement on larger sites and going through the trouble of negotiating a myriad of individual buys across smaller sites. Networks now make this a snap, essentially providing one-stop shopping. And they offer enormous flexibility in targeting and pricing. You can still pay on a CPM, but CPC, CPA and a ton of other models are available for you to choose from. Now that we have more options, how do we make the most of them?