Living in the real world

The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday about a certain kind of advertising fraud online wherein rogue publishers will fabricate impressions by launching numerous, invisible web pages in the background of a browser session that consumers will never see but that can translate into inflated costs to advertisers. Burst was mentioned in the story as being one of the ad representative firms giving shelter to one such rogue publisher, MyToursInfo.com. Obviously, we hate it when that happens, on every level. As small consolation we booted the offending publisher back in January about the time, it would appear, that Ben Edelman, the source for the Journal story, tied into them. [Not a coincidence, I was reminded since making this post, as it was Ben, in fact, who brought the MyToursInfo fraud to our attention.]

iMedia Connection picked up the Wall Street Journal story today with the headline “Publishers Duping advertisers with invisible ads”. Not far away was another story titled, “World’s largest click fraud ring shut down,” which met its end thanks to the efforts of the people at Anchor Intelligence, a traffic analytics firm used by companies, including Burst, to combat fraud.

We are reminded every day that the world can be a dangerous place. The advertising world is no exception. As reporter, Emily Steel, points out in the Wall Street Journal story, verification has been a problem for advertisers forever. Online, she notes, the universe of web publishers is so enormous it can be hard to keep track of every ad position in order to authenticate the number of impressions served. Offline, authenticating the size of an audience - print or broadcast - relies on third-party measurement services such as the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) or Neilsen or Arbitron.

I used to explain to people when arguing in support of the increased accountability of the Internet versus traditional media how advertisers must take it on faith that so many trucks left the loading docks of so many printing plants to deliver so many copies of, say, the Wall Street Journal to so many hundreds of thousands of distribution outlets across an entire country by 6:00 a.m. Online, we just count impressions. I’ve made those earlier morning newspaper runs in the past while working at USA Today. It’s an immense proposition, I can tell you, with a mind-boggling number of moving parts. But, the world has lived with it long-enough to know that, on balance, it works. I’d say the same is true about counting impressions.

Except when fraud happens, as it did several years ago when executives at various newspaper companies were caught inflating circulation numbers, with severe consequences for many. Or, as it happened with a dorm-room full of Chinese college students perpetrating $3 million of click fraud. All bad, unhelpful stuff.

I could, perhaps, end this post now with a message to always be cautious and look both ways before crossing the street because the world can be a dangerous place.

But, I can’t. Sorry. The news that Chinese students have “wasted” $3 million, or that other unscrupulous types have launched  up to 40 invisible pages impressions, while a sad reminder of the corruption in the world, leaves me feeling that more needs to get reported. The truth is not entirely out.

The problems in our world do not come down to a room full of Chinese students, and/or others with a talent for writing nefarious Internet code. The problems in the newspaper world do not come down to circulation fraud.

Always there are conditions that lead to the crime. Frankly, verifying what gets delivered has only been a part of our problem, and perhaps the small part. Of greater importance has always been that media - old and new - has never been good at being able to verify who, exactly, is viewing or listening or reading or seeing an ad. Likewise, advertisers have never been especially good at explaining to each other what happened as a result of the advertising.

From this were conditions made ripe over the years for the Internet to lead the entire marketing industry astray with false promises of one-to-one, risk-free advertising – a bit of fiction that won’t go away and that continues to lead advertising, on and offline, in directions that consumers have been told to fear, now, jeopardizes their rights to privacy.

We should despair over every act of corruption and drum-out the perpetrators. In a side-by-side comparison with a dorm-room full of Chinese college students perpetrating click fraud, however, the notion that the advertising business can be one-to-one and risk-free is the greater treachery. The fakes, the common criminals, the joy-riders, the conscientious advertising banner-blocking objectors, are small potatoes to the mantle of denial that drapes over the broader marketing business today. It drives media buying agencies into the very ad network business they are suppose to fear as a way to make a decent buck. It drives CMOs out of office on average every 18 months. It reasons that consumers should “accept” advertising as a necessary evil (as if that will ever be a bargain worth accepting). It wastes billions of dollars in missed opportunities. And it places a premium on counting clicks and actions and other measures that are so easily pilfered.

Advertising must live in the real world. Occasionally, that means dealing with the abuses of the unscrupulous. At some point, it also has to mean dealing with reality.

Demand-side advertising networks: an issue of consideration.

 

Like the Internet needs another catch-phrase or buzzword (and I’m always the last to find out about the new ones) but, now, apparently, we have “Demand-side networks”, the description being applied to the businesses that are cropping-up within ad agencies that are intended to reclaim the buying territory lost to various ad networks.

Michael Zimbalist, of the New York Times Company, offers a thoughtful piece on the trend in Paid Content, holding the demand-side network model up to the light to look at from 360°. Is it a friend or foe to publishers? In Michael’s opinion, the answer depends on the extent to which demand-side networks move beyond the automated practices of performance marketing to champion audience targeting,  i.e., the right message in the right place at the right time.

Audience targeting, says Michael, implies that the media plan means a lot. (“At long last, audience truly becomes the basis for both planning and buying online,” he says). Performance marketing, by extension, means it does not. That’s an excellent distinction worth holding on to. And, in the context of understanding the future of demand-side networks, we must ask how the distinction is resolved inside media buying agencies where the role of demand-side networks might not weigh greatly – for now, or ever – on the importance of media planning.

I suppose the answer we’d get is “results.” Oh right; That. In which case, the value of demand-side networks will be pegged to performance because audience targeting and media planning are messy, cumbersome businesses highly dependent on – well – planning. They are expensive.

Expensive hurts. As Michael Zimbalist observes, agencies have struggled to buy online display profitably because there are too many suppliers. “But,” he notes, “agencies have woken up to the fact that even as they struggle to make online buying profitable, the ad networks are reaping huge operating margins. And they make these margins by doing essentially the same media planning work that agencies are supposed to be doing for their clients!” 

So, are demand-side networks likely to be good for publishers? Not especially, but that’s understandable because ad agencies don’t work for publishers, they work for advertisers.

The larger question is whether demand-side networks are likely to be good for advertisers. To the extent advertisers desire to regard the whole world through the pinhole of performance marketing, yes; demand-side networks – nearly any network – will be good for them. But the temptation, and perhaps danger, will be for agencies to squeeze as much media buying business through that pinhole in order to reap the financial rewards that have flowed to third-parties until now.

The Internet has become a proxy for performance and this is why: performance is cheaper to the advertiser and more lucrative to the buyer. Publishers have been only semi-conscious of the money that never makes it out the door and into their coffers. Agencies, now, are not.

Is it a problem? Only to the extent that the art of media planning will be a necessary instrument of success in a new media world, and that depends on whether the marketing world will continue to regard consideration as a strand in its DNA – consumer consideration; audience consideration; product consideration; finally, brand consideration. For where there is consideration there must also be planning.

The facts are clearly that the media landscape has fractured into countless bits and pieces. Ad Age’s Bob Garfield calls it chaos, but not me. As a consumer, I call it luxury. I call it wonderful and so does everyone I know that uses the Internet, especially my children.

Wonderful has always been at the end of the rainbow for marketers who until now have never tired of seeking those kinds of connections with audiences. Are demand-side networks selling wonderful? No. Like so much in advertising, they don’t believe in searching for pots of gold at the ends of rainbows these days even if their clients keep trying to bottle such notions and sell it to consumers with rainbow fragrance inside. Fanciful notions like that have been kicked-out of agencies by the grown-ups in Procurement. At this point, demand-side networks are about the best thing media agencies can come up with to save themselves. Who is going to blame them?

Fix agency comp and maybe wonderful happens once more. As a consumer, I’d like to see that in advertising again – and so would everybody I know.

Pride goeth before a fall: consumer magazines talk about building an ad network

According to Advertising Age, rival consumer magazine publishers are talking about working together to build an ad network in order to offer competitive reach compared to other ad networks.  Foremost in the minds of the publishers is the price of their inventory, which has been decimated by third-party ad networks, in their joint estimation. Now, they have determined, it’s time to circle the wagons.

Presumably, salespeople at each magazine would be allowed to sell across the ad network. Or, participants could be envisioning a dedicated network team apart from the rest with shared responsibility for sales. Or, they may be thinking of one person per sales force exclusively responsible for network sales. The parties may be looking at the Newspaper National Network (NNN) as a model, which has done reasonably well for its newspaper clients offline – albeit, as a stand-alone business. 

Whatever. The reality is this (and it bites): a horizontal consumer magazine ad network is the wrong model. Don’t do it.

Aside from the fact that magazine publishers, much as competitors in any other field group, have never shown themselves to be especially good colleagues and collaborators except when attending awards banquets, the horizontal network model will not protect them from brand erosion, the source of all value. If they propose to compete on reach, for performance, by selling across each other’s properties price will enter into it – and the price will be lower. If charging less on one’s own for one’s self can make one feel better, then we must come to terms with the fact that one is not protecting brand; one is protecting pride.

Pride in something has value. Pride for the sake of pride does not. And, today, in truth, there is altogether too much pride being confused for brand among major media companies.

Time to get over it.

A little competition is the thing to make everyone feel better and to support brand value. If magazines want to compete with ad networks they should, indeed, start their own, but they should be proprietary, vertical networks that sink deep roots under their brand promises and take aim at competitive brand properties, as always.

Horizontal generalizes. Vertical specifies. Brands are a set of specific promises, including media brands. If consumer magazines try to compete on reach they will compete on price, thus giving the market permission, effectively, to plan and buy accordingly. Under those circumstances, third-party horizontal ad networks will win. 

Don’t do it. Compete on brand and drill deeper into the proposition.

How? Build vertical brand networks by inviting independent web publishers to assemble under established media brands and sell down through those networks. Voilà, reach happens. Price will follow reach down, but for independent publishers anything above a $1.00 is a win. Bring them $5.00 cpms and they will slay dragons for the provider. Speak in admiring tones about their work and the admiration will cause them to shine. The shine will cast a glow on the market and, voilà - brand halos.

Right now, it’s apparently in the heads of people at consumer magazines that everyone will be judged better if they keep in the exclusive company of each other. For better or worse, snobs don’t really behave that way. Mostly, they conspire continuously to undermine their neighbors and gain the advantage, and this is how it will be with a consumer magazine network.

The status quo, relying on third-parties that are unaligned and unvested in the brand, is clearly no way forward. Consumer magazines are right to want to seek new partners. They would be wise to pick ones that desire them to be successful in the future and are willing to provide unconditional support.

Who is that going to be? It will be the have-nots, the wanna be’s, the aspiring and the yet-to-be-discovered - the Great Unwashed in the Internet wagon train heading west.

And…if you build it, they will come.

Even if OPA publishers won’t listen to Jim Spanfeller, there are many others online that will, if invited.

You can say this about Jim Spanfeller, the outgoing CEO of Forbes.com: he’s straight-forward. There’s very little ambiquity in his piece in Paid Content yesterday, titled “Publishers Are Killing Web Advertising’s Potential With Misguided Pricing,” which concludes by saying “When it’s all said and done, there really is no remnant inventory on the web, just as there is little to no real remnant inventory elsewhere.” Jim is exhorting web publishers not to give away value by entrusting it to the “invisible” hand of third-parties.

Jim is Chair Emeritus of IAB and Treasurer of OPA, and - knowing that -we’re conscious that his exhortations are largely directed at the branded media-types with whom he spends most of his time. But his message applies to all serious web publishers, not just OPA publishers, which is why the OPA could help itself and many others by acknowledging the content value that extends deep into the long tail of the Internet. It failed to do this with its recent study “Improving ad performance online” (about which there has been plenty to say in this space) and Jim slipped past the chance again in his Paid Content commentary yesterday when he said the OPA study ”shows the far greater value in buying ad programs directly from publishers” - a problematic, and somewhat suspicious claim to the vast majority of publishers online without salespeople of their own.  

Buying directly from publishers is not a media value proposition. Buying the value of content, and the audience it attracts, is a media proposition.

Jim Spanfeller is deeply committed to media value and were he invited to speak right at this point he (and possibly also the agents at OPA responsible for their recent study) might hasten to add to his comments that yes, yes, of course, it’s about content and the audience it attracts. But, he’d argue, ad networks and other third-parties aren’t capable of that for publishers. Indeed, in most cases, they are prevented from doing so because they are restricted from guaranteeing web sites and positions. Many of them are blind. So, selling the value of the web site is actually antithetical to their offering and they, along with participating publishers are “killing web advertising’s potential.”

Indeed, it’s a shame, but as it turns out the online system has evolved with a built-in value cap; a governor that keeps the Internet motor from racing.  And, it’s hard to rail against those market forces as Jim Spanfeller is conscientiously doing in order to remove the governor and change behaviors. 

To succeed, you need leverage which has been the point in taking aim at the OPA study released two weeks ago that failed to differentiate among ad networks, or other third-parties that sell value, or offer a nod to thousands of independent web publishers who don’t have their own salespeople, but surely have their own audiences! These publishers can provide leverage to the media value argument online with their passion - as partners, members of a branded content network, or simply (affordable) dues payers.

It’s been said here to anybody who will listen: imagine an OPA (or IAB, or party-to-be-named-later) Annual Meeting 10 years from now with 10,000 people attending, mostly publishers. Think MacWorld. Maybe the Javits Center in New York will hold them. All of them excited to be there to talk about publishing issues. All of them with stories to tell about how their web site is different  and makes a difference. All of them intimidated by the very big Time Warner booth with an invitation over top that reads “Be Part Of The Biggest Content Network in the World!”; all of them whispering as Tim Armstrong walks by; all of them standing in line at the Google booth (“Why Paid Search Still Works For You!”); all of them sitting with their arms folded across their chest listening critically to the panel of senior ad agency executives talking about partnership and performance. Maybe twenty-five hundred of them in the audience blogging and Tweeting and whatever-elsing as the Global Agency Director General of All Things Bright and Beautiful rumbles on about the importance of partnership and performance “with all of you of who are so closely connected to the audiences online that are our most important customers.” 

That’s leverage.

Even if OPA publishers won’t listen to Jim Spanfeller there are many, many others that will. And they can help, if invited.

The Online Publishers Association vs. the Internet: next steps.

Over at the Big Picture blog, Daniel Taylor comments on the inquiry into the indifference of the OPA to the rest of the Internet world. Basically, he asks, what’s the rest of the Internet planning to do about it?

Good question.

It may interest him to know that a few years ago a group of us did, in fact, think about founding a separate trade association to represent the interests of, as he says, “the little guys.” (I used to hate that term because it’s not accurate in regards to many, many web sites out there; but now I’ve grown to like it. There’s something appealing about being on the side of the little guys, even when they might be big.) We were drivers of that initiative at Burst, but then we moved on to other things, and it lost its energy.

Daniel is right, however, it was bound to happen and we did see it coming when we tried to organize. Large publishers would have found a third-party to substantiate their “superior” claims vs. the rest of the marketplace. As I said in the Ad Age piece, these sorts of studies are instruments of state propaganda. We get it. So, logically, next we’re going to rally to produce a study that challenges the OPA claims, and we can have a fair fight back and forth.

Some of the first people we may call to work with us on that study are OPA dues-paying supporters ($5,250 annually), many of which – interestingly – are ad networks: 24/7 Real Media, Collective Media and Tremor Media, for example, along with other ad network enablers such as Ad Meld, PubMatic and Rubicon. Many of those, and many others, celebrate the fact that their networks are rich in OPA member inventory, which explains why they are OPA supporters. We work with Rubicon. We also work with Short Tail Media, another OPA supporter, which is a customer of Burst’s adConductor platform and launched with the intention to help OPA members kick the ad network habit by being the partner of choice for the OPA. We’re rooting for them, naturally.

For starters, as we design our study, we’ll want to understand the implications of the OPA study as it pertains to the value of the inventory they re-purpose through their ad network supporters. Most of those networks bill it as “premium” inventory, but it is probably regarded as scrap, or remnant, by the members themselves. Keeping things apples to apples, our study will want to strictly compare the value of the proprietary inventory of vertical niche web sites to the proprietary inventory of the OPA’s members and not – thank you very much - to the remnant stuff they send to ad networks and which they’ve just shot to hell with their study.

I am confident of the results of our study. It won’t be a hatchet job on branded web sites, however. We expect to be able to show that the abiding relationship audiences have with online media, that is of premium value to advertisers, is derived substantially from relevant and timely content. We expect to show, further, that it does not grow on trees; rather, it comes from publishers that know and care. In the end, we will show that there are many, many, many who know and care online, even some of those at OPA web sites for whom it’s just a job.

The Online Publishers Association: still driving with its foot on the brake.

The Online Publishers Association(OPA), the trade association representing the digital interests of mostly offline media companies, opted to set fire to the forest floor yesterday with the release of a study on brand advertising metrics that, by the time they finished, scorched the effectiveness of the entire Internet as a brand medium save for its 50, or so, members who served as the “proxy for content sites” in the study. That means all the other non-proxy content sites served by ad networks or sales representatives, plus portals – or, basically, the remainder of the Internet - were voted off the island by the report.

There are 400,000 words in the English language and there are seven you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is, the great George Carlin once observed. Add to it, now, that there are 10 billion web sites on the Internet and only 50 on which you can advertise your brand successfully.

They must be reeeally goood.

Unfortunately, this is a problem for anyone rooting for the Internet to get to $50 billion, which many people seem to be doing. If  brand advertisers can only hope to be successful on OPA web sites, the $50 billion means that, a) they will pay through the nose for advertising on the reeeally goood sites, and b) the rest of the Internet will be awash in so much fakevertising it will be like spilled oil on the beach. (Which Yahoo! already thinks is like spilled oil on the beach and is trying to clean up on its sites. Which is not what needs to happen if CPMS go to $250 on OPA sites and you need enough room for an environmental disaster to support the rest of the economy.)

This is what lashing out looks like. The OPA didn’t release a study yesterday; the OPA lashed out at the industry, which it feels conspires every day to wreck the value propositions of its members who are important, dedicated, hard-working, First Amendment freedom fighters that are sick and tired of being trampled by midgets. Honestly, I think they are just that frustrated. Every day it’s attack of the killer ants. Every day it’s a nightmare of compromises and conditions and unwelcome intrusions:

“Another Ad Network to see you, Sir.”

“The local residents have asked if they may hunt on the grounds tomorrow, Sir.”

“The gentleman in the portal next door has asked if he might borrow some Grey Poupon.”

No one is confused about the OPA’s mission: countless years and considerable wealth and innovation went into building the global media franchises that the OPA mostly represents, and keeping them secure amidst the torrent of new media brought on by the Internet is an important and worthwhile assignment. They should be beacons. But we must live in the real world and the real world online isn’t confined to a city block. It isn’t a gated community. It just isn’t. Look up.

The OPA should be the representative for all quality content online including content touched by ad networks and rep firms. It needs to get over the “branded” content thing and identify with millions of consumers online that have abiding relationships (some might call these brand relationships) with plenty of sites the OPA has never heard of. The IAB is wisely reaching-out at a critical time to long tail, independent publishers. The OPA should be ahead of it. The OPA, informed by the centuries-old mission of its founders - themselves small, independent media pioneers – should be the principal steward of online content and quality and a fierce advocate for publishers, big and small, that work hard to create meaningful destinations for consumers. The OPA should be filled with empathy, not petty rivalry.

If so, the OPA’s study yesterday might have offered cover to brand advertisers desiring to allocate more money online in response to all the signs that proclaim that’s where the people are! Instead, the OPA said “No. Mine,” and helped keep the brand advertising promise of the Internet down. In the process, for the day at least, the shift of brand dollars regarded as essential to the future of the industry was postponed. Again.

Aggregation aggravation

MediaPost’s ”Around the Net in online media” picked-up Mark Cuban’s open letter (blog?) to Rupert Murdoch with advice on how to sell content online. His advice has two parts: 1) create editorial scarcity by blocking the aggregators that point to News Corp content and, then, 2) reassemble and repackage News Corp content from around the world into useful bundles that might appeal to news junkies or sports freaks, etc. Essentially, Cuban says to Murdoch, aggregate your own content on your own terms; put the fact that you own a media empire to work for you and make the people pay for that value.

Mark Cuban’s unsolicited advice was presumably inspired by Murdoch’s assertion to the markets last week that News Corp will start charging for content in July 2010. He has that long to figure out how. If he heeds Cuban’s advice the time between now and then will go to weaning his media empire off its addiction to the aggregators in order to create the scarcity value for News Corp content. I’ve relied on a few aggregators just to get this far in this blog post – “Around the Net”, of course, plus Media Bistro (which led me to Time.com). As a drug, they are wonderful alternative to the real thing. The danger to News Corp and others, of course, is that without them reality may bite.

But there is something fundamentally positive in the talk about value and value creation online. The whole third-party aggregation thing is being scrutinized not just on the content side, but on the advertising sales side with the thought that it’s time to start kicking some of these habits. I don’t think many companies are going to be successful charging for content. Cuban talks about the Wall Street Journal as an exception and that may be true. But if companies can’t charge for their content they may want at least to ensure their exclusive rights to sell advertising against it.  

In that regard, we live in the ad network space here at Burst Media where there has been much gnashing of teeth over the last year among web publishers – principally branded publishers such as any of those in the News Corp stable – who are trying to cut down their reliance on third-party ad networks. We have mostly stayed out of the fray by avoiding relationships with publishers that aren’t willing to work with us transparently - meaning, fundamentally, all the brand publishers with their own sales forces. If today those publishers are plotting their escape from unwanted third-parties, we won’t have a dog in the fight and we can choose to root for the value the publishers may win back as result. (And why not root for value?)

Advertisers – mostly ad agencies – are also strung-out on the whole third-party aggregation thing and are devising 12 step programs of their own to get back in charge. At a glance, their goals appear different than the publishers that are engaged in cleansing their systems, but who should be surprised? It has always been thus. The torment affecting everyone online has been a lack of differentiation, and it is that demon causing all the aggravation over aggregation.

Striking value into the hearts of buyers and sellers online: $25 billion more might just do it.

 

Media Post reports that Dave Zinman, VP and GM of Display Advertising at Yahoo!, was talking about “signals” in his presentation to the OMMA Behavioral crowd in San Francisco this week. Dave is a long-time player in the Internet space with plenty of experience to inform his signal calling. With his view of history he postulates that the first $25 billion of Internet ad spending – about where we are now – was driven by search. I’d agree. It’s been essentially $25 billion of clicks and actions thus far.

Dave signals now that the next $25 billion will come from display advertising wherein the value of the impression, not simply the click, will matter most. Yes. For one thing, we can’t be sure there are $25 billion more in clicks and actions available online. The Internet would have to be intergalactic in size, or action rates would have to substantially increase, which is unlikely; consumers are just not that into advertising.

But there is no dispute that the Internet is a staple in the daily media diet of people worldwide. Other media are shrinking, therefore Internet advertising should grow. So if there is $25 billion more in ad spending on its way, how will it be accepted and provided for?

Again, who would welcome $25 billion in additional click and action driven advertising? Under those circumstances, if the Internet were an ocean you would be able to walk across it stepping from one flashing banner ad to the next. You could set the water on fire, which is probably a fair description of the reaction consumers might have to such a polluted environment.

Impression-driven advertising will be the only way to absorb the next $25 billion. Advertising that counts for engagement. Advertising that must, therefore, be creative and compelling (like some of these from this year’s Cannes festival). Advertising that is intended to woo 100% of the audience, not just .5%. Advertising that is efficient. Advertising that can then be bought in units of one thousand impressions at a time. Advertising that can scale without deforesting the landscape, or drying-up all the wells or burning the ocean.

Which must be what Dave Zinman is concerned about from his vantage point at Yahoo!. As he reports, portals got into the advertising network business a few years ago and vacuumed-up all the reach they could get. But impression-based results were never on their mind as part of that initiative. Impression-based results belonged to the people selling Yahoo! homepages and sponsorships. The ad networks were all about clicks and actions and as the market grew and a desire for action rates led to a desire for more action rates even the portals didn’t have the reach to accommodate the results. They needed networks.

Now what? Dave Zinman signals the future: the next $25 billion is going to have to be about the value of impressions. Tim Armstrong may be signaling the same thing at AOL with the dissolution of Platform A and a renewed commitment to selling content and brand.

There has to be something that strikes value into the hearts of buyers and sellers online after all these years and maybe the next $25 billion is that thing.

Ad Agencies should be paying attention to potential opt-in legislation in Washington

Edward Barrera, Editor of Adotas, raises serious concerns that advertising agencies may be dozing through the privacy debate in Washington D.C. that is right now headed towards opt-in requirements for all advertising online. Opt-in means that any time a consumer is presented with an ad, that consumer will be required to accept or reject the cookies associated with that ad, which are there largely to provide the advertiser and their agents with the ability to manage the delivery of the message.

The truth is ad agencies are probably faking it. Their eyes are shut, but their eye-lids are twitching. They are awake and they are listening. As Edward suggests in his column, many are working on the assumption that privacy legislation is going to hurt them a lot less than many ad networks, with the result that they can recapture control over a great deal of media planning and buying online that they lost by treating most of the Internet as throw-away material. A blast at high altitude over the industry is just the thing, they think, to level the playing field.

Yes, perhaps. Agencies have a trump card which is the relationships they enjoy with the clients. In contrast, many purveyors of media space online, including many ad networks, enjoy relationships with advertisers or publishers that are only as deep as their last lunch and which can be easily swept away by the crosswinds of change, including, potentially, regulatory change.

But agencies should focus on what sort of world it might be once the smoke clears. As a consumer, it’s not a world I relish. I don’t even like the reminders Microsoft Windows pops to me each time I want to tinker with a document, let alone the opt-in intrusions that dooms-sayers suggest might attend every ad online. The freedoms that both consumer and advertiser enjoy online could be severely compromised by opt-in legislation that erects check-points every few yards. Doesn’t advertising have enough problems? People don’t like commercial interruptions. Now the potential exists to place an interruption in the way of the interruption?

There are fundamental advertising issues at stake here, the defense of which should be of paramount concern to ad agencies. They have been taunted relentlessly over the years by the digital upstart classes, and who can blame them for imagining a world where the taunters have been muzzled. Still, there is the question of an effective working relationship with consumers, which has been steadily eroding for years. Agencies should have no desire for an Internet experience that says “Kick Me!” every time consumers encounter advertising messages, something opt-in will surely contribute to the ”enjoyment” of an agency’s work each and every time.

Adify Media’s transparency claims are 14 years too late.

Adify Media (div. of Adify Corp) announced a few new appointments to run sales for their emerging media sales business. Glenn Fishback, late of Turn and Claria, will be the new SVP of Media Sales.

I expect it was someone in their PR department that put these words in Glenn’s mouth in the release announcing the appointments:

“In today’s competitive marketplace, Adify Media has created a unique and differentiated alternative for brand advertisers. No other media provider today can offer site by site transparency and performance visibility, brand safety, and targeting efficiency all under one roof,” said Fishback.

Oops. There is at least one other media provider that offers site-by-site transparency - with all the trimmings, notably site level reporting - and that is the Burst Network. The Burst Network has been transparent, site-by-site, since it was founded in 1995.

You can access the list of all the web sites that the Burst Network represents by searching on “Content” here: http://www.burstmedia.com/brand_advertisers/our_channels.asp

Here’s where you can “access” the list of all the web sites Adfiy represents. Good luck. http://web.adifymedia.com/site/index.php/publishers/