Must online publishers resign themselves to the commodity CPMs dictated by the network marketplace? Not necessarily. My suggestion is for online publishers to take their cue from their offline counterparts and package inventory in ways that can't be bought through other channels.

Perhaps the most seductive -- and misunderstood -- form of optimization, behavioral targeting s really a refinement of targeting, or "rules based" optimization. The difference is that while targeting uses explicit segments, predictive models seek to discover rules within the data that are counterintuitive. Instead of When the user has searched for 'TurboTax,' show this offer at this price, the predictive model can look at prior searches and visits to pick the ideal offer.

I am not looking for a simpler time. Nor am I a Luddite; but I'm also far from a tech enthusiast. I don't carry a "berry" or any type of handheld device beyond my cell phone. I read way too much email as it is, so my excuse for not getting one is to avoid feeding my own habit. Jeff Einstein, who used to write regularly for MediaPost, would write passionately and convincingly that we use media the way addicts use drugs.

Consumers are spending nearly twice as much time online than they did four years ago, and eMarketer predicts that online ad spending will more than double in the next few years - jumping to $44 billion by 2011. It's no surprise that ad dollars are following the eyeballs - but the critical question for marketers is, what exactly are those eyeballs spending time looking at?

Living far below the math- and technology-drivien, auction-based, dynamic pricing approaches provided by companies like Right Media (and used by Google for that matter), is the reality of how media is planned and purchased for brand advertisers. The distance between this dynamic sales approach and the buying discipline in play for this segment are miles apart.

Yesterday I attended an Advertising Week luncheon where a young strategic planner looking to break the ice asked his tablemates, "So, what do you think will be the next new new thing in digital?" Knowing this strategic planner had come out of digital and was now working across multiple channels, I replied, "You." While I know I did not necessarily answer his intended question, it did get a few of us discussing the need for a specific type of strategic thinker: media types that were grown by their respective organizations the way he was -- an "If-Then" media professional.

Of all the different types of optimization technology there are, targeting is the simplest way of exploiting differences among your visitors in order to draw in greater revenue. If you find that different groups of people - say, visitors who arrive from Yahoo vs. visitors who arrive from Google - respond differently to different layout or copy, for example, then you should make sure you can show those groups different content to make the most of their preferences.

An extremely well-manicured lawn increases the value of a home, right? How can it not? But what if you held a garage sale every weekend? Does the revenue earned from selling stuff neatly strewn across your lawn on a regular basis make more economic sense than keeping your landscape consistently immaculate? In the short term, one costs you money; the other generates cash flow one buck at a time. But if each approach works, which one works better over the long term? Online publishers are facing this issue in their own backyard.

As media continues to race faster toward being bought and sold like a "commodity," math skills will continue to play a more vital role in determining the winners and losers of those selling it. And that's a problem for most of us. If we were great in math, we would probably not be working in advertising.

Just as your Amazon Gold Box is full of stuff you'd never buy, most Web sites you visit are full of annoying ads you'll never respond to. Advertisers are reaching audiences, no doubt, but not necessarily the best targets for their products. The inability to control where ads appear or predict the content of the publisher's Web site is equally alarming. How do you find the best target audience for your online ads without going bankrupt? And how do you reach that audience without bothering anyone else?