I'm not sure what gave advertisers the idea they had control in the first place. It might have been the feeling of power that comes from being ensconced in an ivory tower....

In my business I get asked a lot of questions by clients and prospects. Colleagues often ask me to share what's hot and what's not or predict trends, etc. Lately it seems everyone has been asking about tagging....

So, how about last week's deals between Yahoo and eBay and Google and Dell? Yahoo has become the exclusive seller of graphical ads on eBay, and Google will be the default search toolbar on most computers shipped by Dell. Big stuff. Seems to me like the Digital Divide just got a whole lot bigger.

Social media may be riding a wave of hype right now, but nobody can deny that it is forcing traditional media companies and marketers to rethink what the media business is all about. In fact, the proliferation of social media is causing otherwise traditional media providers to grasp the notion that their product is anything but linear, one-way and, most importantly, completed once published (and I'm not talking regurgitation of digital archives).

Over the last few years, we've seen much discussion on the desire/want/need for an Interactive Gross Rating Point (iGRP). During the last few weeks, as agencies and advertisers considered how to allocate their dollars in the upfront season, this question has arisen again--but as much as I feel it would be great to have an apples-to-apples comparison for evaluating media, I've come to the belief that an iGRP is not the answer.

If you haven't already, try this exercise as part of your ongoing online media efforts: work with one of the broad-reach ad networks to pixel-tag your site and serve ads to folks who have already visited your Web site. Compare the results of this remessaging effort to those of your existing network buys. You should see a huge difference in performance.

Online advertising is hot. So hot in fact, that pundits lately have increased projections for the potential size of the online ad market, some now predicting that U.S. online ad expenditures could hit $35-50 billion by the end of this decade, up from $12.5 billion last year, according to IAB/PWC.

Amidst the excitement surrounding online word of mouth (WOM) and consumer-generated media (CGM), many marketers and agencies are allocating disproportionate attention to two areas. The first area involves overt word-of-mouth marketing campaigns, and there's no shortage of those among even the biggest marketers these days. The second area includes consumer-generated works that spawn organically and somehow achieve enormous virilaty and reach.

What we've been seeing take place in the UGC arena to date represents the easy stuff; the "no-brainer" ideas. The current trend to invite consumers to create advertising or create content that integrates a brand or the brand message represents the simplistic means of creating content, but within this content, we see some glimmers of future light as well as some possibilities for smothering the idea before it even takes off.

If you're a die-hard "Lost" fan like me, you've noticed some fake spots for The Hanso Foundation, the shadowy organization supposedly behind much of the show's mystery, running amidst the legit commercials....