Single white-shoe agency seeks rich client. Must like lots of market research and planning, but not put too much scrutiny on billed hours. If you enjoy long waits for creative changes and reissues of media charts, then give a call. No yellers.

As many of you know by now, media has traditionally been segmented into many different kinds of categories. One of those categories is temporal, or segmented by time. This is called the “daypart,” and folks in the online industry have finally started looking at their medium in this kind of way.

Online advertising is plagued by its own successes and haunted by our own failures. We built this industry on new terminology and non-traditional metrics, and we will be paying the price for this error for a long while unless we rectify the situation now.

There are many uncertainties concerning the online marketing business that keep me up at night. This week I thought I'd share some of the fears that are lurking in the darkest corner of my anxiety closet. Here goes...

We can only speculate about the future. But given the lessons of the past, products and services will increasingly be tailored to consumer demand. It is one thing to invent something. It is another to put something into the marketplace that people really want.

Too many agency management people hold that an ad agency can’t afford to turn down any business, and that the agency must change its philosophy to reflect the needs of its eclectic clients. If an account director comes with a client request to redo advertiser’s roof, the general manager is apt to heartily accept the project and ask if they can charge a commission on tarpaper. Agencies that fail to stick to a specific value proposition, however, become opportunistic parasites on the marketing industry. There’s no real management in managing such an agency – instead it’s just sales and more …

The grousing continues. As the year has worn on past the half-way point, folks within the industry still wonder why they are not getting their fair share of the advertising budget pie, while those who only write about the business are in awe that the industry still survives at all. So the question remains, why is it that this fine industry of ours does not get the respect (read: MONEY) it deserves?

The Brand. The Brand is the holy grail of advertising. When marketers look to spend their ad budgets they always tout the strength and importance of The Brand. When a medium cannot clearly detail the effectiveness or power of their advertising it usually states that it’s strength lies in developing the Brand. Is the strength of a Brand positive or negative? What truly is its power?

I've been following the threads on the Spin Board concerning Dave Smith's column of August 1 ("Send Me Your Stories"), as well as the August 8 follow-up column by Jim Meskauskas ("Dave Smith is Right"). Some interesting points were raised by both articles, as well as by the subsequent posts on the Spin Board.

As we get closer to September 11, many of us are reflecting backwards to 9/11/2001 and what has happened since. And if you are like most Americans, you are starting to think about what is the proper thing to be doing this year on September 11.