Ad networks are a tax on lazy publishers. They are a cancer that slowly eats away at you from the inside, doing severe damage even though you feel fine. They are a cancer that has spread to nearly every publisher, and threaten to do irreversible damage to our industry.

At an IAB conference two years ago, an executive at Microsoft took the stage and flashed a slide to the audience showing the ecosystem in which MSN competed. AOL wasn't listed on the chart. Later that afternoon, then-CEO Randy Falco reminded the room AOL was in the portal business too, and should be ignored at "your own peril." I never worked for Randy Falco, but I did work for Tim Armstrong at Snowball.com -- and oh, man, are MSN and Yahoo in for a fight from this sleeping giant of a portal and its new giant of an executive.

Since I have been writing for MediaPost, I have focused most of my columns on various facets of engagement, hoping to contribute to the industry dialogue on this topic, by suggesting ways that we can think about engagement in a way that enables advertisers and digital sellers to buy and sell more effectively. And so I thought it would be a good idea to offer a primer (disclosure: ex-college & high school teacher on the loose) that pulled together some of the central ideas I have been writing about here for the past 15 months or so.

As marketers, we are continually working to position our product or service as something "better": better than it was before, better than our competitor, something that will provide a better quality of life. How each of us defines better, however, depends on the context and the audience. There are many different paths, apparently, to Internet advertising nirvana. How do we find the greener grass in this digital pasture? Let's look at a handful of ideas that have generated recent headlines.

We lived fast and loose the last few years. As executives, we sometimes spent money too carelessly, as salespeople we sometimes oversold, and as publishers we failed to innovate our product and help advertisers measure success nearly as much as we should have.

Full disclosure: I am tired of hearing publishers whine about the declining value of the online display advertising they sell. They did this to themselves. Can you name any other medium that forces consumers to view more than one advertiser at the same exact time the way online publishers do?

Did you see the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress presentations at the Oscars? This year they tried a new format in which five former winners take the stage and each in turn speaks to one of the nominees. More than their male counterparts, the women winners spoke from the heart. And in almost every case the nominated actress seemed genuinely affected by her peer's personally and intimately expressed admiration. A hundred million of us were eavesdropping on these tender moments. In a way Facebook is like that, I am discovering. And it is leading the way to deep connections …

"I'm kind of a big deal." Those are the immortal words of the legendary Ron Burgundy as he introduces himself to lovely Veronica Corningstone in the movie "Anchorman." As an accomplished newscaster, pseudo-celebrity and owner of many leather-bound books, Mr. Burgundy carries himself with an air of confidence and arrogance that allows him to approach anyone he chooses with an expectation of their immediate acknowledgment of his awesomeness. While I'm no Ron Burgundy (although I do own one leather-bound book), I put on my press hat last week to conduct an interview with Kawasaki, Alltop.com 's co-founder and managing director …

Everybody is sick of bad news. Unfortunately, bad news is only the start of the problem. The really scary part is that every major crisis brings the nutcases, freaks, whack jobs, and the merely uninformed bubbling to the surface. They stand ready to give their misguided opinions on how we got into this mess, and then quickly shift focus on who or what to blame.We all need to stand up and refuse to be scared.

Here is what online publishers (of any size) can do to sell more display advertising than those they compete with. First, eliminate all ad unit placements below the fold -- or keep them, but use them strictly for bonus impressions to drive down the effective CPMs of deals you are trying to close. The bottom of the page view is garbage in the eyes of those who buy your inventory, so why ask your sellers to sell it? Just dump it.