There has been a great deal of gnashing of teeth among thought leaders and others in our industry during the past six months or so over the tension between innovation and operations in our business. The Web marketing business is largely populated by leaders who innovate but who have little knowledge of the operations - the granular, working elements - of their enterprise. Digital marketing is no different from many other businesses in this way, which is one reason why so many businesses fail. The pain in this tension seems never to dissipate in our business, as even some …

Starting Monday afternoon and going well into Tuesday morning, the wires were hot with the news of Barry Diller's acquisition of AskJeeves for the price of nearly $2 billion. You all remember AskJeeves, don't you? It's the search engine that in the late '90s made much of its natural language search tool. It was going to revolutionize search as we knew it then, which, admittedly, wasn't all that well. At the time AskJeeves came online in 1997, the online media industry was still very much in its infancy. And search marketing? Search marketing at the time largely consisted of …

As always, Time magazine runs a column called "Numbers" in which random statistics are thrown out based on some relevancy to newsworthy items from the past week. I typically look at these snippets of information as directional signs for popular culture, and as a result this is a sign of where advertising should be headed. This week there were numbers I felt were very interesting and worthy of noting.

An axiom of online marketing goes something like this: "If you can't scientifically ascertain a measurement, at least provide ammunition supporting your best guess." That's what we should be doing about the cookie-blocking and cookie-clearing problems. It would take visibility into the security settings and application usage preferences of tens of thousands of average, everyday Web surfers to understand fully how cookie blocking and cookie clearing is affecting our measurements and metrics in this industry. This isn't something that can be accomplished easily within a short timeframe. But we don't need such a study to tell us that …

A lot of people had invaluable comments when it came to my rich media piece last week. It seems that just about everyone thinks the term rich media is out. It also seems as if the industry need not replace it with a timelier phrase. My colleague and fellow writer Jim Meskauskas chimed in and said, "Let's just call it media." Many of you echoed his sentiments. As far as creative goes, many of you reference rich media units as none other than ad units. In speaking with several folks from the buy side, I have found that there …

There have been some very strong commentaries published in MediaPost this week, with two bylines standing out above and beyond. These two are Jeff Einstein's "Be Careful What You Ask For" on Wednesday, and Jim Meskauskas' "Remember the People" in yesterday's Online Spin.

Last week I wrote about the possibility that the cookie - or, more precisely, the data harvested from it - is not the only thing that should concern us when advertising products and services to people. I dared suggest that singular reliance on the myriad data we can get might not be the solution to all our marketing problems. Would it surprise you that a lot of readers were upset by that? I did say that cookies help, and I very briefly sketched out some of the ways they do. What I tried to do was simply caution against …

I was having dinner this week with a colleague and we got to chatting about the six-year cycle. The six-year cycle refers to the period of time it takes for Internet advertising elements to get hot again. In the 11-year history of Internet advertising we see that certain elements return about every six years. For example, in 1996-1997 the best place to put your money was in search. At the time, we were referring to banners within search inventory. In 2002-2003, search once again became the hot topic, but this time it was in reference to text-based advertising.

Inspired by the trials and tribulations of Mark Naples this past week, I wanted to talk about something similar to what he's been grappling with recently - the extent to which the purveyors of "proprietary" technology in our industry can expect the inner workings of their technology to remain hidden.

We all know that online ads have been sold for over a decade now. We also know that a few years ago a term was coined for Internet audio that wasn't so cookie-cutter and pixilated. After much thought and debate, the term rich media was born. It seemed apropos for interactive media units that incorporated streaming audio and/or video. Finally it was something us Net-heads could sink our teeth into. Hell, we thought it would get us closer to offline creative.