We're heading into a phase of the online ad business that's clearly based on the concept that not all inventory was created equal. The fervor around the viewable ads issue, coupled with the rapid development of data management platforms (DMP), which make marketers smarter about how they spend their money, leads us to a situation where placement, audience and performance of creative can influence the value of the inventory that's available. That means changes are in store for the media buying community.

Picture a herd of buffalo racing toward a half-empty watering hole. Each buffalo is competing to get a sip before the entire herd arrives to drink it dry. Now consider the lone buffalo that says, "screw the rest of you," and runs in the opposite direction where he believes there is another watering hole with no competition. That lone buffalo takes on some risk, parts with the crowd and scores a monopoly on a new watering hole. He fully quenches his thirst and lives on prosperously.

I'm old enough to remember the first Internet bubble, and lately I've been having a feeling of dj vu. While most entrepreneurs and investors seem more disciplined this time around, there are some worrying signs. They include:

A few months ago, Inc. magazine taught me that the classic definition of an entrepreneur was coined 37 years ago, by Harvard Business School professor Howard Stevenson. An entrepreneur, he said, is someone who pursues opportunities without regard of the resources currently under control. I repeated that definition to someone else. "In other words, a fantasist," he said.

This is a special time in the ad industry. What happens in the second quarter's upfronts will go a long way toward determining industry economics for the rest of the year. What will have happened when this week and quarter play out? To answer that, I will borrow a Jack Welchism and try to look "at the market as it is, not just as we would like it to be.

Online marketers have a so many options in display advertising -- contextual targeting, data targeting, behavioral targeting, retargeting, dynamic creative -- that they can quickly become overwhelmed. However, there are some simple considerations you can use to evaluate, prioritize properly, and engage in a successful display campaign.

Last weekend I accompanied my five-year-old son to his little-league team photo shoot. The professional photo studio and "baseball field backdrop" in the elementary-school gym made for a strange scene -- specially considering there was a real baseball field a few feet outside, and it was a sunny day with beautiful light. But things got really strange when 10 parents urgently whipped out their smartphones to capture their own shots of the professional photographer taking the official team photo.

There were clear signals last week that the digital media industry is growing up and yielding to the norms and metrics of the broader media advertising industry. The goal of these actions is to capture more brand ad dollars -- the surest path to revenue growth. Here are three examples:

TV advertising is not going away, and much of the future success of Web and digital advertising will be determined in large part by its ability to establish comparability to TV advertising. That was one of the top takeaways from my spending the first part of this week at the well-attended Festival of Media, Global 2012 in Montreux, Switzerland.

The importance of being market-ready was first driven home to me back in 2009, when Marc Andreessen was busy writing the best business blog in the world. In a post titled "The Only Thing That Matters," he said, "market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure,"