I read with great interest the exclusive announcement which ran on Memorial Day in Stuart Elliott's New York Times Advertising column about your getting back into the advertising game. I think that's great news, for you and the business itself. As you know, this business is not for the faint of heart, so hats off to you for making such a "big" re-emergence. You're back, and better than ever. And as usual, your timing is perfect. My concern though is that the comments you made regarding the business has much to do with traditional media.

We need to do something about spam, and we need to do it now. When I’ve written about spam in the past, my problems with junk email were pretty much limited to trust issues – if spammers didn’t ease up, nobody would ever consider email to be a trustworthy commercial medium. These trust issues could destroy legitimate email marketing. But now we have bigger problems. Spammers are threatening the very infrastructure of ISPs and other email providers.

Internet advertising started out as a “national” medium, which at once sets it apart from all the others, and also may point to why the medium has so far failed to penetrate the vast regional and local markets.

Last week's iMedia Summit - lots of smart people on both the buying and the selling side of the industry are here, exchanging ideas, having arguments, giving speeches… oh, and going golfing.

This last essay has nothing to do with large or small agencies. It has to do with the agency of one - ourselves as individuals.

One of the topics at the iMedia conference in New Mexico last week was “Search is hot, so what’s next.” This author went to the panel hoping to find out what was next. With all of the buzz about search, and all of the future potential, he began to wonder why so many companies are underutilizing this vehicle.

Too many advertisers are running DR advertising that tries to hit a moving target. Not knowing when a prospect is ready to buy, the advertisers often don't know the best point at which to pull the trigger. Thankfully, we have CRM tools that can help to take the guesswork out of this.

Last week, WebSideStory, a company that analyses traffic data, put out a study that seems to prove what we’ve long suspected – that some sites’ methodologies for counting traffic have still more holes in them. In particular, they harped on sites that use the “meta refresh” redirect and fail to account for the extra page views that show up in server logs.

How do you know when a product has finally become a brand? Or when a brand has finally made it as a true leader amidst a faceless sea of undifferentiated me-toos?

Having spent the last 20 years at creative and/or media agencies with billings in excess of $100 million annually, a new turn in my career is a great education. I’m currently in the process of learning as much as I can about the network of small creative shops servicing the interactive media business and, to be honest, it astounds me.