So you're a "traditional" media company. You watched as attention shifted toward a more fragmented new-media landscape. The attention shift on its own is not nearly as big a deal as an outsider might think, because you knew a little secret: As long as brand dollars stayed with those media outlets where it felt safe, Google and its algorithm-based ilk could have the direct marketing budgets of the long tail, and you would be just fine. But recently things have started to change....

While at OMMA Hollywood last week, I met a new friend in the business. Turns out we went to the same college and graduated around the same time. As we got to talking, he asked me if I Twitter. Smirkingly, I admitted I haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet.

One of the most prominent narratives in computing and artificial intelligence has been a computer capable of beating the world chess champion. That historical day arrived on May 11, 1997, when IBM's Deep Blue narrowly defeated then-champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. Yet while the world's infatuation with master-chess-playing computers has leveled off, a similar man-versus-machine debate is likely to become more prominent in our advertising industry.

Online ad money is moving into premium content environments, and the portals and major online ad platforms are probably not going to be the ones selling it.

Last week I was introduced to the idea of visual search. If you haven't heard about it yet, then take special note, because I think this will be important. Visual search is the concept of reorganizing and representing search results in a graphical manner

Consider me shocked. I hadn't heard any official stats on what candidates were spending online this campaign, but I assumed it had to be quite a bit. So imagine my surprise when I hear on talk radio that of the massive amount of money candidates are spending this election, only about 1% will be spent online.

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.