If you pay attention to the press covering advertising, you probably know about the latest brouhaha over Nielsen's attempts at switching over to their People Meters into Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. The people meters are meant to be a more accurate means of measuring audience than the diary system that has been in place since 1950.

After last week's announcement that Univision was suing Nielsen for unfair trade practices and trade libel stemming from Nielsen's launch of local people meters in Los Angeles, stories like the one I've linked to from the Times have shown us that we've got a full-scale revolt on our hands. No longer simply a business issue, the question of minority representation in Nielsen's market samples has led to a huge debate that has Democratic lobbyists and politicians - Hillary Rodham Clinton among them - fighting alongside executive management from News Corporation.

Those of us who have been on the agency side of the fence have written about this often (myself included). For those of you who know me, you also know I write about bad agency manners as well. So today, I'm here once again to share the war stories with you.

This week, Eyeblaster introduced a new product that is, I believe, a step in the right direction. The company's VideoClip Module is an in-stream advertising and content management solution that enables web publishers and advertisers to create and serve video-based ads directly into video content streams. That's right - it makes them more like TV-style commercials, at least that's how they'll seem to ad execs who have been reluctant to migrate budgets from TV buys to interactive.

It's been a couple of decades now that the first of the big media-only shops started opening up. The idea that singular media buying entities could yield greater efficiencies by nature of their "clout" and allowed creative shops to be more strategic and "creative" started an evolution in the agency business that led to the mitosis of traditional agencies into two separate entities: the creative shop and the media hot house.

How long should it take for an interactive ad campaign to be considered a success or a failure? This question is related to the even more simplistic question of, "How long does it take to build a brand online?"

Clutter is among the many enemies of effective online advertising that reared its ugly head once again when the market started to recover and online advertising experienced a rebirth. Yes, we're going to have to go back and revisit the clutter issue, just as we're revisiting ad impression counting, terms and conditions and all of those lovely issues that were placed on the back burner after the crash.

Because of this coupled with all the recent hoopla on behavioral targeting, something dawned on me. Many times email is a cop-out. It is a hell of a lot easier to email someone versus direct a sensitive question to them in person. We are so used to processing so much information - be it imagery or words online. Our world has changed to the quick sound bullet "conversation" laden with abbreviations and acronyms.

For most of my clients, I'm a PR guy. I've been involved in some kind of "strategic communications" since 1987. So, I have a special appreciation for the power of images, messages, and well-executed campaigns. I mention all of this as prelude, because we're currently knee-deep in an era of media hyperbole, and I firmly believe that it will affect the world stage in the coming six months.

Rules of engagement; best practices; sequential liability; impression counting... these are all things that those of us active in the industry have discussed, or have heard discussed, for a very long time. Years ago these and other issues were brought to the fore by attentive media nerds and seasoned publishers alike as necessary foundations for a stable and sustainable business. Without these issues being discussed, problems they raise being elucidated, and solutions to those problems being found, reliable protocol for conducting business would never really materialize.