"Luke, I am your father." Being a huge Star Wars fan, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit these words again to make a point that many of you may have missed. These words were spoken the last time there was a great disturbance in "the force." In the last two weeks there has been another great disturbance and one of the most well respected sales people in interactive advertising announced that he is "coming over to the dark side," so to speak.

Despite pitches from dozens of technology vendors every month, I rarely talk about individual products or services in this column. Mainly, I avoid product reviews because I'm supposed to be writing an opinion column. But every once in a while, something comes along that knocks my socks off and makes me feel like my readers should know about it ASAP.

Wednesday was the last day of Ad:Tech. The conference only ran sessions for a few hours. I went to "Clicks, Ticks, and the Destiny of Pop-Ups" session. The room had about 50 or so people in it. However, I was a little bummed out to hear the audience still beating a dead horse when asking panelists if rich ads online were dubbed intrusive.

Are we there yet? The just completed Ad:Tech provided an example of more questions, not answers to this question - at least to me. Now that our industry has graduated from its VC-charged stage, and companies who participate in these show are, by and large, making money the old fashioned way, we've finally shed our delusions of grandeur mindset.

I wonder again out loud; why are we not seeing more online advertising from companies for whom the Internet is a necessary medium for their business to even exist?

Did anyone else see the section in Time magazine last week that dealt with the evolution of wireless technology and how it is starting to be incorporated into the everyday life of the average consumer? The articles were rather basic, but the part that got me excited was the section devoted to the various gadgets and gizmos that are being launched to provide consumers with wireless access to many of the devices they use every day.

Sometimes I feel as if some of the work our industry does to isolate the effects of online advertising in integrated campaigns is like the never-ending pursuit of the Grand Unification Theory.

If you've been following my columns, I left the agency world as a casualty at the end of this past June. Since then, I've been running an online consulting gig, vowing never to go back to countless hours of backing into full time equivalents (FTEs), job codes, client codes, red tape and political BS.