Site optimization gets overlooked because most agencies aren't allowed access to site-side data, and therefore they focus on bringing qualified people to their clients' sites. However, optimizing the destination to provide the most immediate path to conversion is the most effective element of your campaign.

We're all being expected to act like a mom and pop store, even if we're an international conglomerate. One of the ways in which we're becoming smaller is by delivering on the expectation that we'll communicate directly with the market through online channels....

Well, I'm fired up today. Why, you ask? Did you hear how AOL publicly released search data of 658,000 customers without their permission? It gets worse: most of the search queries represent the filth that lives online.

Advertisers' unstoppable march to claim every bit of blank space as a commercial vehicle makes me wonder about the bigger picture: Are advertisers suffering from addiction? Thanks to media fragmentation, media-device proliferation and an erosion of trust in institutional messages, the effectiveness of paid media and intrusive messaging is imploding. So what do many advertisers do? They keep buying more and more just to achieve prior levels of impact. In other words, they're hooked.

The online ad industry is booming. Revenues are way up, and good feelings are flowing.We've seen this movie before... in 1999. It's great being the belle of the ball, but we should take to heart some lessons from the last time around.

Since the model for general media planning is going to see a continued shift in the coming years, I thought I'd take a moment to explain where I think it might be headed.

Pigeonholed. That's how I'd describe prevailing attitudes toward rich-media creative at a lot of the agencies and publishing companies I've been speaking to recently.

On vacation in Nantucket, Seana, "like a social anthropologist meets media strategist," observes teens and tweens and finds that texting and ringtones rule.

As advertising dollars continue to bum-rush the Internet, many media specialists contend that blogs, discussion groups and other forms of consumer-generated media represent easy, additional inventory to grow and satisfy demand. Indeed, several of the biggest media companies--like Yahoo, MSN, News Corp., IAC and others--are placing big bets on the promise of consumer-generated media as ad vehicles. CGM has arrived as a center of gravity, and advertising is following. But I fear that too many advertising and media specialists are jumping in head-first with little appreciation or respect for this new world, which is fundamentally different. Unlike most …

Late last year, I wrote a column about a good friend and one of our industry's key leaders, Tom Deierlein, the chief operating officer of Dynamic Logic, who was taking a leave of absence to return to active duty as an officer in the U.S. Army with an expectation that he would be headed to Iraq for a year-long deployment. Having just received one of Tom's monthly e-mail updates, I thought it was timely to remember Tom in a column.