Being forced to listen to someone's cell phone conversation while standing next to them in an airport security line may feel like torture, but it's not life-threatening. Watching people pound away on their BlackBerry while you talk to them may kill your self-esteem, but it's not life-threatening. Dialing cell phones, sending text messages, or responding to emails on mobile devices while driving is killing thousands of people every year -- and as a medium, we could not care less.

Those of us raising teenagers are all doing our best to teach our offspring not to participate in risky behavior. We promise rides home from parties with no questions asked. We talk about safe driving practices, seatbelts, safe sex (OK, some of us don't talk about that), not to trust people they "meet" on the Internet. You get the idea. Being safe, or at least making smart choices about risk, is one of the key attributes of mature behavior. But every day, in the business world, we aid and abet risky behavior.

Growing up as a basketball fan in a couple of small towns in Iowa back in the '70s and '80s, my access to news and information about my favorite teams and players was limited to a handful of box scores in the local paper, a periodic feature story in Sports Illustrated and an occasional game on NBC. Fast-forward 30 or so years. Thanks to team Web sites, fan blogs and social media applications we now have access to more content then we could ever consume, and I love it! To get a behind-the-scenes look at what the digital revolution looked …

The real issue in display advertising has nothing to do with inventory. The real issue is intent. The fact that billions of page views go unsold each month is not, alone, an indicator of a supply problem. You have to first understand the quality of the supply.