Last week I was taking to someone who is new to online advertising and marketing. She was fluent in print advertising in both newspapers and magazines. I was explaining the difference between print lead times and online lead times for "close" dates. I think she was pleasantly surprised that with online advertising we need about five days to traffic and test creative versus sometimes months of time in print. What we didn't talk about was the shelf life of some online environments. Depending on your business objectives, media plan, creative on hand et al, this could be bad or good.

In case you've been under a rock, a new star was born. His name is Sanjaya. Who? Sanjaya Malakar, the less-than-stellar "American Idol" contestant who can't seem to get eliminated from the reality-television singing competition -- and whose daily buzz levels even exceeded Britney's. As someone who works in market research, I'm fascinated by pop-culture storms such as this, and especially when passionate voting and metrics play a huge role.

Newspapers have been in the news lately, with this week's announcement of Sam Zell's highly leveraged effort to buy the Tribune Company just one of a number of a number of "big" recent stories about the industry and the future path of newspaper publishing companies. So, with that as a backdrop, I ask you, "Which major newspaper will be first?" No. I don't mean which major metropolitan U.S. newspaper will be the first to collapse under its own weight and shut down. In this case, I am focused on something more positive. I want to know which major newspaper will …

Once in a while I come across brilliance, and this week I came across Webkinz. The trend in social networking is to create and develop niche networks that reach a specific audience and encourage interaction. Webkinz is a social network tied to a toy company that targets young children and places them in a virtual world that is safe, exclusive, and appears to be a lot of fun!

How many ad units are you exposed to on any given Web page -- banner, page sponsor ads at the right and bottom, center box etc.? Flashing banner ads, rope the bull, score the winning basket, win an iPod, fake system error messages, shocking ad copy -- anything to induce a click. On television noise can be literal volume. Ever watch a program loud to begin with, then the commercials come on and they are so loud the whole room looks for the remote to turn down the volume? Heard of towns recently voting to restrict outdoor advertising as it …

I was emailing back and forth with a colleague/friend a week or so ago and he dissed me for being such an American. He asked that I mention other countries in my Spins. On the heels of him saying that, I saw some pretty cool stats coming out of the U.K., where online ad budgets grew like wildfire this past year.

How many marketing-conference tote bags do you have piling up in your office? For me, conference totes have lost their appeal. They've reached saturation, and this is underscored by the fact I've received at least 21 of them since the beginning of 2006. Conference totes have become so terribly abundant that one could argue they're now an environmental hazard. In an age where sustainability is becoming a key dimension of social and corporate responsibility, we simply can't continue along this path!

Three times in the past two weeks, I have been asked my opinion on the current state of "view-thru" conversion tracking. It seems that lots of people these days are concerned that view-thru tracking has gotten a bit out of control and is distorting the connection between the actual effectiveness of individual media properties and their "apparent" contribution to driving conversions for advertisers.

Over the last three months I've given a presentation on the future of Internet TV more than 40 times -- and every audience for this presentation has resoundingly agreed that Internet TV represents the single most exciting area of growth for advertising over the next five years. I typically share my thoughts on the i-TV future and provide rationale and support for how to sell it, but I don't need to do that today. The rationale and support is all over the place and is slapping our clients in the face with the obvious nature of the message. No; I …

User-generated advertising is not the future of advertising. The task of imagining, producing and distributing a compelling brand message will not be left to whoever chooses to pick up a webcam on a random Sunday afternoon. Instead, I propose that the radical shift, commonly mis-titled user-generated advertising, descending over the world of advertising is in fact better called distributed creative development.