There is a lot of relationship shifting in the online agency world. Client-agency relationships aren’t so much “marriages” as they are dates who “go steady.” Heck, a lot of agency relationships are one-night stands.

How you can leave a client meeting without feeling like you just sold your soul for a handful of silver.

Here is an exercise that I think it would behoove each of us to undertake… Put down that piece of paper and stop typing for a moment. Please take a deep breath and then explain in 3 sentences or less what is interactive advertising?

The dot com industry spawned its share of buzzwords and buzz phrases that can no longer be used in casual conversation without eliciting a groan and a roll of the eyes – "paradigm," "push technology," "outside the box." The last time I was able to talk about these things outside of the context of a joke was in 1998 or so. There's another phrase I'd like to see go the way of the dinosaurs – "Crisis of Confidence."

Are cross media deals dead? Or is it just too early to do them? Did the media planners cause the death of multimedia deals by demanding too much specificity? Does the changing of the guard at AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal recently mean that the cross media deal is dead? Lots of questions and nobody seems to have any answers. But that’s why we’re here, to take a shot at it.

Alright, so maybe I do have a bee in my bonnet. I keep thinking that Internet media prices are too high. The reason? The number of impressions keeps multiplying, so the supply continues to outstrip demand. This makes the effective prices go down, but this isn't the media seller's nightmare some think it is.....

What kind of agency are you? Are you an "Interactive" agency? Are you a "Traditional" agency? Are you a "Direct Response" shop? Are you "Integrated?"

Attention dwindles as the world speeds up. ESPN the Magazine recently had a cover story that dealt with the likes of Barry Bonds, Jason Kidd, and Ichiro and how they play their respective games at speeds unlike any of their peers. It’s not that they play smarter or better, but they do play faster. So much faster, the world around them appears to slow down. I think advertising is the same way.

Thanks to technology, we could be looking at an explosion of new content sites. What could this do to online media planning five or ten years down the road? It might be wise to think about what the marketplace might look like if a wave of independent publishers suddenly started entering the game en masse.

Why is it, in the face of this overwhelming desire for standards on the part of sites, agencies and advertisers, that the Web is the only major medium where the majority of the sellers do not grant standard 15% agency commission on buys?