The second any client receives a post-buy report from their first online advertising campaign, they all instantly turn into direct response marketers. But, heaven forbid you should talk in terms of direct response marketing, or they'll have you fired and put on the rack!

As the push for incorporating traditional metrics such as reach and frequency into the planning process continues to gain steam, I once again find myself asking the old question of what is an effective frequency for creating a reaction in online advertising?

How about being a spammer, but not knowing it? If you use email lists as an advertising tool, it’s easy to become a spammer and not even know it. Advertisers may not know it, but there are several middlemen between their ad agency or in-house email capability and the origination point of a given email list.

My family went to Thailand for Christmas. The cultural differences that we encountered reminded me once again that, no matter where you are, if you operate solely based on your own assumptions, you could be very wrong.

Yahoo!’s acquisition of Inktomi – the company first made famous by developing the search technology behind the original HotBot search engine – seems to some to bode ill for Google’s existing contract to serve Yahoo! as its search provider.

It is time to minimize and simplify the number of ad units available to us in order to accentuate rather than dilute the value of advertising on a particular site.

The Efficiency Model for media planning relies on the concept of purchasing media as inexpensively as possible (also referred to as tonnage). The Effectiveness Model, sometimes referred to as the Consumer Model, relies on the concept of purchasing media that will drive the highest response rate possible (also referred to as contextual or behavioral targeting). Both of these models for media planning are considered in today’s market and both are fully capable of achieving a client’s objectives, whether they be branding, direct response, or both… but which one is better?

I consider the adoption of planning tools to be a critical issue in our industry. Simply put, we need to take advantage of what suppliers are putting out there in order to streamline our day-to-day workflow and make sure that we’re not losing the media game due to process issues. And one of the critical areas in our developing process is scenario development.

Last time, before I disappeared with the family for several weeks in Thailand, I wrote about things that I had learned from articles in the first six months of 2002. Today I am completing the review with a look at learning from the second six months of 2002.