Back to the issue of advertising being art vs. science for a just a moment… Traditional scientific testing requires the establishment of a control, isolation of variables, development of a hypothesis and a statistically significant sample size for definition of a confidence level that is high enough to warrant the analysis of an outcome. But how much is enough?

Having been in close contact with many publishers, buy-side colleagues, marketers and industry analysts, I can say that it looks as if the interactive business is beginning to experience a rebirth of sorts. This time, the spoils belong to the smart ones who can make it work, and not the hypesters who pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes in the first go round.

It seems like, everywhere I go, I am asked about Web Reach & Frequency. Now, I have certainly set myself up for this, having written about it for several years, by my involvement with the ARF Online R&F Standards Committee and participation in industry meetings and through various speaking engagements. Not that I mind the questions. This issue is near and dear to me and I can give you an hour on it if we could find the time. But in this case, I’ll try to limit it to a page or two.

A billion dollars spent on political ads, and during a midterm to boot. In a different column, I’d rail against the pollution of money in politics, but today I’d like to explore why the online markets got practically none of it.

I was recently researching some inventory on a site that I was considering using to carry a Unicast asset. While I was inquiring as to the cost premium of running such a unit on the site, the site’s sales representative informed me that, in addition to the $5 CPM ad serving premium (which is itself ridiculously high… but that’s another article topic), I was going to have to pay as much as 77% greater a rate than if I were to use run-of-the-mill GIFs or even Flash units. “My Lord!,” I exclaimed. “Why so much more?”

Many of the campaigns we see today are not taking advantage of the true nature of the web. The web is all about bringing together groups of like-minded individuals and allowing them to share information and interact. The web is self-publishing gone wild, where anyone can say anything to anyone at anytime. The campaigns today seem to ignore these capabilities of the web in favor of tonnage and mass reach (funny since back in the old days no one thought the web would become a mass medium).

Everyone who reads my column regularly knows that I will take an occasional pot shot at large agencies. It’s not a bias. I just dislike the fact that many large agencies seem to be trying to turn interactive media into a commodity. Although many large agencies haven’t yet figured out the magic formula that will allow them to make money by planning and buying interactive media, there are quite a few other things that they do very well. One of these things is training.

Last week at the IAB Leadership Conference, the Morning Keynote Speaker was Randall Rothenberg, Chief Marketing Officer at Booz Allen Hamilton. He talked about some of the troubles that the agency business faced. One point really hit home. In the Q&A, Mr. Rothenberg opined that agencies could not meet two big front-end needs for clients, consulting in corporate and brand strategies and consulting in technology. As you are no doubt aware, it is hard to separate the two these days as your strategy can vastly affect your technology needs and, despite the turndown, technology still represents a huge investment for …

For all our hand wringing about the value of online advertising, the most valuable information may well be about the weaknesses of some traditional media.

I’d been thinking about the PVR space for a couple of weeks and was hard pressed to come up with a way of demonstrating the size of the PVR audience that would make it clear to the advertising community that, though TiVo and its ilk are worthy of our study, they are hardly the extant threat the advertising media and those interests it represents would have us believe.