If you are reading this, you either work at an ad agency, have an agency represent your brand, or sell ads to both groups. (If you are not in any of these camps -- well, heck, thanks for reading.) If I may, tell me what you think of when I say these three words: dog and pony. You laughed. Well, smirked, at a minimum.

Consumers are creatures of habit and they irrationally overvalue the benefits offered by products they're already using. They despise having to change their behavior to use an innovation. Consequently, they often reject products that are objectively superior to the incumbents they're already using....

The events earlier this week reminded me of a situation that I faced almost eight years ago, in the middle of 2000. Back then, I was the chairman of Real Media, Inc., a company that I had founded in 1995 and which, like other online ad companies, was on a real growth tear. Our revenue was doubling year over year and we were on target for $50 million of revenue in 2000. We had filed for a $100+ Million IPO just before the NASDAQ tanked -- and, like almost everybody else in the online ad market, were hopeful that the …

When are we going to abandon click-through as the primary online metric for success? I speak with a number of salespeople on a very regular basis and I hear the horror stories of agencies, clients and marketers who profess to be running a "branding" campaign and all they ask about is click-through rates! I hear all about "direct response" marketers who are buying low CPM inventory in the hopes of driving customer acquisition -- and the first thing they ask about is click-through rates rather than conversions and/or landing page optimizations.

Since the now in/famous "frienemy" title given to Google by the keepers of Madison Avenue, the question has loomed; Is Google friend or foe to the advertising agency community? Google's real goal is to be THE advertising OS (operating system) through which all advertising decisions are planned, executed and measured. The announcement at the 4As conference of an integrated dashboard for agencies is simply the latest evolution of this strategy

It seems we are in the age of let's-do-nothing-traditional-anymore. We rarely send cards in the snail mail; we send them by email or make posts to someone's "wall" in social media. We ditched land lines for cables through modems aka voice over ip (VoIP).e have an on-demand mentality and expect to get what we want when we want it: news, information, entertainment, weather, scores, etc. And that's just when we are being consumers.

Following are some uncut, verbatim gems from journalist Brian Morrissey on Twitter: words of PR wisdom, really. Sure, there's an emphasis on poor practice and blunders. But if they weren't prevalent, we wouldn't be addressing them. The ad industry -- which suffers from low trust and credibility -- should take note.

Last week started off with a pretty extraordinary annual meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau in Phoenix. Not only were most of the major players in our industry there -- from Wenda Millard of Martha Stewart to Brian McAndrews of Microsoft -- but none of them were shy about saying what was on their mind. Brian was not afraid to talk head-on about Microsoft/Yahoo merger issues, offering probably the most memorable commentary of the conference when he told the audience to get prepared for a duopoly in the online ad business, with Microsoft and Google as the only surviving providers …

How often do you sit back and think about the relationships you have? I do it quite a bit. Your friends, your family, your boss, your peers... whether it be a business or a personal relationship, the strongest ones thrive based on the same simple principle: it is better to give than to receive. A selfless attitude is an effective way to approach a relationship, and in business this is especially important. The best sales or business development people are those who take a genuine interest in you, identify areas of common interest and can help you to succeed and …

Show of hands, how many of you ever owned a minidisc player? There was about three months there when it just seemed reasonable that minidiscs were the next big thing. Smaller package, held more music, great quality sound, didn't skip. Yep, the music industry was all set to be taken by storm by the minidisc revolution... except that MP3s just made so much more sense....