One of the biggest challenges in this business is getting paid for one's work. If you've been in the media planning and buying business for any length of time, you've witnessed first-hand how financial foul-ups can ruin the best media campaigns.

I’ve come across two issues recently regarding research, where in one case there was entirely too much transparency, while in the other - a deceptive shell game. Though the fatalist in me voices that “chaos theory” rules supreme, the cynic wonders whether it’s more “Keystone cops” than anything else. Which is more irresponsible?

There is something that’s been bothering me for quite some time now. No, it isn’t the sound of the war drum that the Bush administration is beating. It isn’t Bloomberg’s proposed smoking ban for bars and restaurants. It isn’t even the irreconcilability of Cartesian dualism or the geopolitical significance of Macedonia. It has to do with pop-up inventory.

What is the day in the life of an online media planner/buyer they really like? I’ve been asked this question from time to time when interviewing prospective employees and my usual the answer has been, “There is no routine. Things change from day to day and it totally depends on where in the planning cycle you are.” I just came to a realization that this is not true anymore.

Much has been written about the inefficiencies of buying and selling Internet advertising. But what about the cost of research and resources to the buyers and sellers? This is another factor in the willingness of major agencies and major clients to participate in all that the medium has to offer.

Single white-shoe agency seeks rich client. Must like lots of market research and planning, but not put too much scrutiny on billed hours. If you enjoy long waits for creative changes and reissues of media charts, then give a call. No yellers.

As many of you know by now, media has traditionally been segmented into many different kinds of categories. One of those categories is temporal, or segmented by time. This is called the “daypart,” and folks in the online industry have finally started looking at their medium in this kind of way.

Online advertising is plagued by its own successes and haunted by our own failures. We built this industry on new terminology and non-traditional metrics, and we will be paying the price for this error for a long while unless we rectify the situation now.

There are many uncertainties concerning the online marketing business that keep me up at night. This week I thought I'd share some of the fears that are lurking in the darkest corner of my anxiety closet. Here goes...

We can only speculate about the future. But given the lessons of the past, products and services will increasingly be tailored to consumer demand. It is one thing to invent something. It is another to put something into the marketplace that people really want.