There are four common ways account lists are assigned within a publishing sales force. Here's why divvying up business by ad agencies usually works the best.

As a media sales guy, I will gratefully take business from any agency with a fax machine and an email address. Rarely available to discuss campaign ideas or optimization? No sweat, I'll work with you. You say you never provide creative on time, yet you expect full delivery of time-sensitive, highly targeted inventory? I thank you for your business. History of paying your bills 6 months late? Go ahead and send me the insertion order!

We recently had an industry moment brought on not by an acquisition or a new technology, but rather, by an advertisement touting a chicken sandwich. I first noticed it nestled above-the-fold on the home page of UGO.com. The copy read "There is no web site for it. It's tender and spicy and you just go eat it." So naturally, I clicked on the ad six or eight times. With each click, something I had never seen happen online occurred: absolutely nothing.

With Google selling other media and the eBay experimenting with selling cable TV and, most recently, radio, some publishers worry that automated, auction-based ad systems may be out to replace the brand ad sales executive. There are many reasons why this won't happen, regardless of whether these high-profile efforts are successful. But this doesn't lessen the need for both media sellers and advertisers to start thinking about separate strategies for inventory used for branding and inventory best used for achieving performance objectives such as efficient reach or "cost per whatever" (hat tip to Dave Smith, Mediasmith).

Are you afraid to be great? For some of us, it's scary, for others it's too hard. But whatever the reason, the irony is that being great at your job makes your life easier. So whatever it takes to accomplish this stature has to be worth it, no?

If you sell media, you want to live in Bigdealville. This is not a physical place, but a mental one where you constantly look for opportunities to create an extension of your brand that doesn't exist -- while making your quota disappear. The old guard refers to this as custom publishing; today it is called online sales.

n the real world we turn to colleagues and friends for advice on what products and services to buy; generally trying to avoid the salesperson. Understandably this is why social media is so effective and can facilitate an increase in a marketer's bottom line. No longer do we have to rely only on mass media for our information and advice. Social media (and Web 2.0 technologies) allow us to create innovative targeted campaigns to promote brand and product awareness and can provide us with valuable feedback.

Recently the IAB issued a formal request for research companies Nielsen and Comscore to have their reported figures audited. The discrepancies between the numbers reported by Web analytic tools reading publishers' log files and those by Nielsen and Comscore are football fields apart. The reasons provided for this spread seem to make sense -- but why not validate them or uncover potential flaws through a third-party audit. Either outcome would be good for business, no?

There is a right time and place for everything, and the time to read content in long form should only exist inside the glossy walls of heavily stocked covers. Consumers pick up a magazine because they have the time to slow down, which is why time spent is an endorsed badge of reader commitment in print. But consumers go online to speed things up. So time spent on your magazine's Web site is not nearly the lay-up this metric makes in print.

We have a quality-control issue on our side of the fence, folks. Not a lot of great salespeople out there right now. There are far more bodies on the street selling media now, then there were before 1998, let's call it, so it's natural for the quality of media sales representation to decrease. But there is something more going on here.