I'm a salesperson for a fairly large vendor. We have sales contact quotas where I need to make 20 phone calls a day. I guess it's just a "numbers" game as my sales manager says, but it's hard to make that many meaningful calls. Any tips to get me through?

What do the Geico Caveman TV ads have in common with the Mohegan Sun sign at the new Yankees Stadium? Well, for starters, you cannot click on them. And despite the great hope metrics mavens have held for clickstream proof of online ad efficacy, virtually no one clicks on online display advertising. Unless "someone" refers to the one in a thousand clicks a typical ad receives, some of which are of course mistakes. (I'd say that every thousandth times I am on a site, I accidentally click on an ad. How about you?)

Recently fellow Online Publishing Insider David Koretz wrote about four ideas he thought were terrible. I agreed that a couple of them were indeed terrible. But Koretz said that publishers should develop better technology to target ads to the right readers as Google does -- so by optimizing ads on a per-click basis, like Google, publisher too can earn revenue to match. Wrong.

How do you convince someone to care about the world around them? Less than 12% of all U.S. news coverage captures anything beyond the U.S. border. Sadly, most of the measly 12% is just recycled AP news stories.

I would like to begin a discussion on ways that publishers can increase total direct sales and reduce their reliance on third-party sales. One way to look at this problem is to divide ad inventory into two categories: 1) Highly demanded (e.g. sold out or nearly sold out); 2) leftover (AKA remnant, network or house).

Ever since this thing we call online got started, we have been claiming credit for the actions taken by the consumers advertisers pay us to reach. That's like taking credit for the sale of coffee because you work the cash register at Dunkin' Donuts. And yet this is the flag we came out of the shoots waving, which is why nobody liked us back when nobody liked us.

Welcome to a look at the underside of the digital world: the buying and selling of digital advertising, products, and services. We'll highlight a few examples of what's going on in the community of hundreds of ad sellers, media buyers, technology vendors and buyers.

We live in an economy of reduced marketing budgets and increased pressure to reach our audience using fewer resources. While I would welcome a larger budget and a handful of marketing geniuses at my disposal, I was reminded over the past week of the power that one individual could have, given a compelling story and the passion to communicate it.

I am tired of listening to the same tired ideas. As creativity coach Julie Cameron once said, "Nothing dies harder than a bad idea." Here are the four worst arguments in our industry that need to be left for dead in a ditch somewhere....