As usual, the iMedia Summit (this one was at The Camelback Inn in Scottsdale) this week produced a lot of fodder for thought. One of the themes that came up very early and also often (both from the dais and in individual conversations) was that of integrated planning.

A lot of folks out there are still very hard on the creature known as Gator. In spite of settling major lawsuits and inking long-term deals with respectable properties like Overture, many persons INSIDE the industry are still clamoring for Gator to be stuffed and mounted or turned into a nice wallet-and-belt set.

This week I've been listening to a number of intelligent people whom I respect speak rather poetically about our industry and there appears to be one underlying element that I am recognizing. Our industry still has an inferiority complex.

Yesterday, Seana wrote: While this is all well and good, what do we do as advertisers? We ditch outbound email.

A startling 90 million unsolicited text messages a day are sent to subscribers. For those of us who spend our days being online marketers, this is a more than a moving, but rather a wildly waving red flag. In the recent Federal Trade Commission's spam forum, the sentiment was the realization that this truly is a problem. Now what?

Sometimes it is fun to get past the day-to-day problems and think about the future. I find that with E3 coming up, the video game business has been front and center for us. Software development in general and the Web specifically has benefited from the leading edge development that goes on in the video and PC game marketplace. On-screen games and applets that were fun to play with just a few years ago turned out to be the precursors of today's rich media like EyeBlaster.

Like most of you, I've been reading the news over the last couple of days from Unicast and Eyeblaster, about their "new" ad units. Eyeblaster has a 100K unit now, and Unicast created some buzz with their between pages unit which are really jumbo size Superstitial pop-ups. Does the Internet need bigger pop-ups or heavier banner ads? The more I read about these so-called "new" units, the more I keep thinking that this sort of sounds familiar. So, I thought I'd check on what some of the more strategic agencies and advertisers already have been doing for months.

I was realizing this past week, after returning from vacation, that some of my more recent articles may not have been as sharp as I would have liked and I decided I need to get back to writing about ideas that are applicable in our every-day working lives.

Single white female ad executive seeking to uncover behavioral changes in a dominant environment. So you are on your pc reading through email and you opened this message. (And you probably thought I was going elsewhere with this piece.) What else are you doing? Listening to the radio? Maybe you are IMing someone or multiple people for that matter. Now how 'bout your target audience? What are they doing? Do you know?

Who remembers the Jerky Boys? They were two guys who made a career out of making prank phone calls and recording them. In one of my favorite Jerky Boys routines, they ring up a car dealership in response to a classified ad for an open sales position. The funniest part of the prank call is when the Jerky Boys describe their car sales technique, which involved ramming a consumer's face into the hood of a car and commanding him to buy the car. I laughed hysterically at this. The idea of someone using force to compel someone to buy something …