According to the one and only Yogi Berra, if you come to a fork in the road, take it. Wise words, especially when placed against a new piece of research, released a few weeks ago. Commissioned by MSN, endorsed by the IAB and ARF and held together by a client and brand that you might have heard of: Unilever and Dove.

The experimentation with alternative media during the dot-com explosion reinforced a fundamental tenet of advertising that we should always keep in mind: Ad dollars follow eyeballs. Why then are we slow to capitalize on ad opportunities within a medium that reaches more than half of all Americans? I’m talking about video games.

Looks like I've picked yet another topic that requires more than just one trip to the bar in order to quench one’s thirst - the importance of session length.

Our nation’s system of earnings reporting and accounting is about as broken as our campaign finance system. It’s been corrupted for so long that the “tricks” companies employ to even out their reported earnings have become standard business practices, and companies that don’t employ these sleazy methods are seen as cheating their shareholders. This comes to haunt agencies and media companies because one of the most prevalent methods to hide money is to stick it in the marketing budget.

Vendors have to be open to the idea of understanding where an agency is coming from with its strategic thinking. If they’re not open to that idea, a proposal will amount to nothing but a shot in the dark.

… but advertisers should. Since the early days of monitoring traffic on the web, one of the metrics that metering services provided for sites and agencies was session length.

Man, I love advertising. As a liberal arts graduate, there isn't another field I could have possibly chosen that would present more ethical and moral dilemmas. This is an industry that tests our very souls.

Syndicated research from companies like MRI, Simmons and Intelliquest can tell us all sorts of things about a given target audience. But something usually gets lost in the translation between the language spoken by the planner and that of the buyer. Lost, that is, unless you’re talking about advertising online.

one last go-round on the matter of intrusiveness in advertising and then it will be time to move off this topic. The subject has, however, instigated a great deal of discussion. It is obvious that there are a great diversity of opinions about (a) whether good advertising actually is or needs to be intrusive and (b) just what constitutes intrusiveness.

Advertising is witnessing the beginning of a renaissance! As the economy starts to right itself and advertisers look towards ways to expand their customer-bases, advertising will benefit from an increased examination on how we can effectively reach an audience.