In our quest to build relationships with consumers and potential consumers of our products and services, we often find ourselves having to deal with a highly opinionated segment of early adopters and opinion leaders who can help make or break a new product or brand.

Greetings. I'm back from the long weekend. I hope you had a good one. It does seem as if it were a long time ago though. I don't know about you, but this past week seemed to kick into high speed for me. A lot seems to be happening. The fall is upon us and conferences are popping up all over the place.

I received a great deal of feedback on last week's column regarding media addiction, and the topic is one that I've been thinking about a lot anyway.

I was just reading the other day on Editor & Publisher that newspapers are hoping they will finally get their fair share of political advertising this season after decades of broadcast's dominance has rendered political advertising in newspapers obsolete.

Now that search is fulfilling the inevitable promise of decreasing ROI effectiveness against increased demand and increased prices, what are we to do with search?

What do you do when another company publicizes the promotional material you use to sell your product, putting it in front of thousands of people in your target audience over the course of several years, helping to build your business at no cost to you? You sue them, of course.

Tom Hespos' piece this week got me to thinking. Many in our industry have been talking about what he termed 'media withdrawal,' which begs another question that others have addressed, i.e. media addiction.

When I first started in advertising, I had two responsibilities: one was to post all of Burger King's spot TV buys in every market in the United States; the other was to learn as much as I could about using demographic research tools and understanding the information they provided.

Every few months it's fun to make a prediction and try to anticipate the direction of the advertising industry, so this week I decided to take another stab and see if I could stir the waters up a bit. This time I'm guesstimating five years for the demise of network television and the reign of cable and interactive as the two dominant forms of media.

I spent the better part of last week on a small island in the middle of a lake in Maine. No electricity, no running water, no phone service (cellular or landline) and no contact with the outside world. It took a half hour by boat to reach anything remotely resembling civilization. Under a clear night sky, stargazing unimpeded by lights or air pollution, I thought deeply about what Jeff Einstein has been talking about for several months - media addiction.