My respected colleague Erwin Ephron published an article last week on his site titled "The Babel Problem." This article talked about the standard of television terminology and why other media should not use this terminology as a default. He goes on to say that each medium should choose the metrics that mean the most to it. As I got deeper into the article, I realized that I agreed completely with Mr. Ephron, yet I felt there was more.

Spam, Gargantuan Banners and the Free Shipping Ad Absurdum. Discuss.

You know, I’m always amazed at just how little thinking and reflecting goes on at the upper echelons of marketing departments throughout this great nation of ours.

This past week I was subjected to a few articles debating the merits and negativity associated with pop-ups (again). I was sad to see this issue being retread yet again, but since we’re on the topic of old, tired, ridiculous topics, lets visit one that we let sit for awhile in the hopes that it would be addressed but unfortunately has fallen by the wayside once again.

I was on a Jet Blue flight to Florida when I first learned that NASA had lost contact with the Space Shuttle Columbia. Every seat on the flight had its own television screen and access to DirecTV. I was watching MSNBC when reporters broke the story. Not everyone else was. Are we no longer sharing experiences through the media?

The other night at dinner, a fellow media maven asked me if I thought that this was the year that the upfront was going to go cross-media. I started to answer no, for all of the usual reasons: few sellers understand all the media in a deal, there are no agreed upon methods between buyer and seller to set the relative valuations for the various media types, packages like this need to be planned, then bought rather than sold, etc. We got into talking about the barriers, and another reason surfaced.

First, the Bush Administration’s SEC poked several large holes in the legislation Congress passed to try to make financial fraud more difficult. Then, just a few days ago, AOL dropped the other shoe on its write-downs, claiming another few tens of billions of dollars in losses. What does it all mean?

A while back, a very important agency person from the traditional realm who’s been around the business a very long time, asked me some questions about what I thought was still needed to get general market advertisers to start using the Internet as a serious advertising tool. Here's what I said.

We may be witnessing the evolution of television media before our very eyes and I wanted to take a second to point out some of my most recent observations, as discovered while channel surfing this past weekend…

Ever wonder why some commercial messages seem to bounce off of people without having any sort of effect?