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.