There’s a little tiff going on at the Spin Board. I’d let it go, but it happens to be a debate over a subject near and dear to my heart – the separation of planning and buying in interactive media.

Top media managers of major media agency independents contend they “don’t know how to make money on Interactive.” If the buyers haven’t figured out an infrastructure, the sellers are more limited in their sales opportunities. What needs to be done? Here is a partial list.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone really disagrees in the world and we all just confuse ourselves by using different words and phrases to mean essentially the same kinds of things.

InsightExpress released a study a few days ago rubbing our online noses in the fact that people prefer print magazines over their online equivalents. And, heck, I’d have to agree, given the current state of online graphic design and the hardware systems’ display technology.

Guess what the latest mandatory training session is these days for many of our most seasoned business reporters? How to get along with others? No. Sensitivity training toward extraterrestrials? Wrong again. Forensic Accounting, that’s what.

Jim Meskauskas made some great points in his last article about how marketers use data, and he reminded us that sometimes we lose track of what really matters about advertising when we bury our noses in data. However, the final paragraphs of his article plunge a meat skewer into the idea of one-to-one marketing, and I don't think it was justified.

In our world, everybody’s an online buyer. It doesn’t matter who they are. They all think that they can do a better job than those who do it full time. The list includes:

Three weeks ago, eMarketer announced that it was breaking with its previous practice of considering all available research and decided to endorse the numbers from Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) for the estimation of online spending. Why would a firm, whose main value comes from considering all available information, decide to single-source such an important number?

Last week, Jim declared in no uncertain terms that the consumer of media is at the heart of every ad vehicle. Be it online or offline, a media vehicle designed exclusively around an advertiser is not a sound practice. It is audience that always has, and always will, matter most. Though most of what he heard from readers regarding his position was positive, some still had questions (and good questions at that) about how audience is identified and what constitutes that audience’s value. Here are some answers.

It’s almost as unbelievable as ‘man bites dog,’ right? Everyone knows that American industry is much more proactive than the government any day of the week, or is it?