If you believe that the upfront -- that reliable bastion of old media where the vast majority of television programming is purchased by advertisers in advance of the upcoming season -- is flawed and dated and should be sedated and put to bed, then you need to wake up to reality and understand the flaws in your own thinking.

Last week, in "Why Web Sites And Online Marketing Suck," a conversation was started over the metrics that matter for social media. The more conversations I had about it this week, the more I felt I needed a sanity check. The myth is that the goal of all advertising is to sell product. The truth is that selling product is important, but at what price you can sell your product, and what people will do to get your product over a perfect substitute, is where the real money is.

I've been in the online ad business since 1993. Believe it or not, I am still having a lot of the same conversations I did back then. I work with brand marketers and advertisers as well as publishers. Quite often they find themselves asking what online advertisers want. They don't think they want banners, text links or email, for that matter.

My 18-month-old son has been obsessed with hinges since the age of six months. It's awesome to watch such a simple apparatus fascinate such an early yet fast-developing mind. Any door or large object empowered with a hinge will captivate my son longer than any toy specifically designed to entertain or stimulate. A future engineer? Maybe.

In the new world of marketing communication, the future will be a lot less about what you say and much more about what you do. Thus, brands now live and die by how they perform for their customers, because the Internet permits those customers service stories to be amplified and shared. The power of those experiences is already starting to eclipse anything that marketers can do with advertising. We've seen this in the positive case of Zappos sending flowers to a bereaving customer and we've seen it in the negative, as in Jeff Jarvis's Dell Hell.

Last year I started writing about Web 3.0 -- the concept of the Semantic Web -- and over the last few weeks I've seen more and read more on this topic, which leads me to believe that it's gaining steam. The Semantic Web refers to a layer of intelligence that could be applied over the Internet and tailored in a manner that would deliver a fully customized experience to users, providing them with what they would want, based on a set of algorithms that hypothesize what they like, want and need.

I have long been convinced that standard online marketing metrics were not only ineffective and inefficient for marketers, but were also destroying the quality of content on the Internet. Over a year ago I wrote about "Advertising's Role In Crippling The Internet As A Medium" and again in "The Online Advertising Conundrum - More Metrics, Less Meaning." The basic gist was this: because marketers were demanding metrics (i.e. impressions, clicks) that did not necessarily equate to value for a marketer, and could be faked or gamed, traditional media metrics were creating a lose-lose-lose eco-system on the Internet for publishers, advertisers …

As a regular attendee, speaker and occasional programmer and sponsor at a range of interactive marketing events, I've become sensitive to several facets that can make or break the conference experience. Most of these are obvious, but the obvious too often is neglected or ignored altogether. Conference producers, take note! Here are my top ten recommendations to be great...

At least since the early days of radio, when newspaper companies tried to leverage their local print franchises into local multi-platform media franchises -- or some might say, leverage their print monopolies into multi-platform monopolies -- folks have been thinking about how to make different forms of media work together to create more power. For all of the talk of "360 degree media and marketing," true multi-platform media marketing is still largely just a lot of talk and not a lot of tangible action. However, I think that we are going to see a lot of change here very soon. …

If you recall, way back in November of last year, I laid out my predictions for 2008. Among those predictions, of which I have to say I'm not doing too well, there was one for the "killer app" in social media -- and I want to revisit that topic because I'm still flabbergasted that no one has come up with it yet!