Is advertising truly the perfect marriage between art and science or does advertising rely more heavily on one than the other? Earlier this week I was having this very discussion with a colleague of mine, and I thought it was interesting enough of a question to pose to the masses.

There’s a sign on the front door to my building. It says “No Menus, please.” Pretty simple, no? Except that some restaurants completely ignore our request. Anybody seeing a parallel between this situation and how some businesses approach direct response advertising on the web?

Forget AOL and Earthlink for a moment. Sure, they’re making a big press deal about being anti-pop-up, but the real story is the fact that the Internet audience is having a violent reaction to these deliberate and annoying interruptions.

There was a time in the history of this business, as short as it is, when we were transitioning from the dot-communistas pouring garbage trucks full of money into parking lots outside of web publishers’ offices to a more reasonable, albeit panicky, quest for dollars from general market advertisers. It could be argued that that is a transition still in progress. I would argue that it is over, and now it is a matter of depth and volume on the part of the general market advertiser. However…

An old mentor of mine once said, “If you want to know the future of online advertising, visit gaming sites and porn sites.” I never really agreed with him on this “observation” (I think he just had a lot of free time), but recently I noticed the gaming sites are indeed doing their jobs better than the majority of the online publishers.

Direct response ads won't be fleeing the web anytime soon, even if brand advertising picks up next year.

I could not help but notice the trend these past several weeks in print vehicles covering the Internet and the “new economy.”

We have written before about the value of online media optimization. For most media, planning has the most clout, closely followed by buying. While we have been evaluating optimizers for what seems like years, it all came to a head for me last week.

I wish it weren’t true. The 4As takeover of the electronic media buying efforts of the now-defunct MediaPort will fail as predictably as the well-intentioned efforts of MediaPort’s big agency parent companies.

It is true, people. As it turns out, this Internet advertising thing isn’t a fluke. It is a real business with real people doing real things and making real money.