Last week I revisited my crusade for the simplification of our medium. This week I felt I would spend a little time sharing some of my opinions on how a new marketer should make their introduction to Interactive Advertising a little less painful, 'cause as we all know this industry typically likes to make things as difficult as possible.

"Is that your best price?" I asked the salesman of the price he had just quoted me on the shiny new Toshiba notebook. The salesman asked me to wait for a few minutes while he ran some numbers on the computer and talked to his sales manager. Within a few minutes, I had the price I wanted and I completed the sale. The salesman never had a chance. I had done a lot of research online to determine what I wanted to buy to replace my aging laptop.

When local radio stations air call-in shows, especially of the sports talk variety, it is expected that the content of these shows will be, shall we say, less than savory. Listeners beware - the views you hear may not be those of the station, its owners, or anyone but those speaking.

It's a very simple thing, but why do we still call it "Rich" Media? Is there anything but Rich media (and don't answer "text", that doesn't count). Is there room for "Bland Media" to come back?

I just came off a week chock-full o' conferences. While I think it's healthy for our industry to gather together every so often to talk about where we are and where we're headed, there's always room for improvement in our industry's key conferences. After all, if there wasn't room for improvement, we would never get those surveys at the end of every conference asking us to rate the content.

By now you've heard a bunch of us talk about the Forecast 2004 event in NYC last week. My experience was a bit different. All day the panels consisted of a bunch of people on stage coming to some sort of a resolve. I moderated the last panel. It was different for a couple of reasons.

Like many of you, I've been following the controversy and court cases surrounding the US Federal Trade Commission's creation of a Do Not call List. This list, for those of you not attuned to the issue, enabled consumers to provide phone numbers that became "off limits" to telemarketers, with a $11,000 fine assessed for each offense. I should think that many of you are like me and that you signed up your home phone number immediately.

I'm flying back from the iMedia Brand Summit, where I've just spent the last 2 ½ days listening to brand marketers, interactive publishers, and agency luminaries all speak on matters relevant and, in some cases, urgent, to not just online advertising, but advertising in general. I'd like to touch on one of those issues now. iTV.

We all know that click rates are low, but anyone who is experienced in interactive advertising will tell you that click rates don't matter all that much.

Any online media planner who has worked with a small client knows about buy minimums. Publishers implement them because it doesn't make financial sense for a sales rep to spend time trying to compete for $5,000 budgets. This makes sense, but it effectively locks out the small business guy who wants to test out online advertising.