Under Whose Aegis

Name: Sarah Fay
Home: Boston, MA
Role: CEO, Aegis Media N.A.
Communion Venue: IAB Headquarters, New York
Communion Date: April 9, 2009
Engrossment Topics: Ad-unit standards, T's & C's, data usage, regulatory affairs
Fun Fact: My half-eaten kati roll from Roomali on E. 27th St. was perfuming my adjacent conference room during our entire meeting, yet Sarah (a consummate gentlewoman) made no mention of this most obvious fact.

CBS Everywhere

Name: George F. Schweitzer
Home: Westchester County, NY
Role: President, CBS Marketing Group
Communion Venue: Breakfast at Michael's, W. 55th St., New York, NY
Communion Date: April 7, 2009
Engrossment Topics: Search vs. discovery in marketing; value of the uber-brand vs. value of the product brand; interactive television widgets
Fun Fact: George is currently writing the "Watch This!" blog on CNET. Its purpose: "Exploring the future of television viewing."

A Very Big Spaceship

One of the joys of my job is the opportunity it offers to meet, pretty much every day, the men and women who are reinventing our world. So I thought that I would try to commemorate each such meeting with a snapshot (thanks to my new iPhone). So here's to my new habit!...


Name: Michael Lebowitz
Home: Brooklyn, NY
Role: Founder & CEO, Big Spaceship
Communion Venue: Breakfast at Les Halles, New York, NY
Communion Date: April 6, 2009
Engrossment Topics: Creative technology, leadership, industrial organization, home renovation
Fun Fact: Two-year-olds + staircases make your arms grow stronger

"I Am the Long Tail":
Interactive Advertising vs. the Recession

Kevin Savetz, the founder and proprietor of Savetz Publishing, an online venture for individuals and small-business owners like himself, is modest about his venture. "I try to create sites that genuinely help people solve problems," he says in a new and controversial Web video. "They may not be huge problems. It may be as simple as 'I need a time sheet spreadsheet for my business.'" But he's been able to build his own and several other lives around these simple offerings because of two things: sweat equity, and advertising.

"All my sites offer all their information for free or for just a few dollars, because the sites are primarily supported by advertising," Mr. Savetz says. "Advertising plays an essential role in keeping my business alive, in making my living and keeping my two employees employed."

He is far from alone. In this same video

• Jay Hallberg, Vice President for Marketing and co-founder of Spiceworks, a site for IT professionals in small and medium businesses, explains why he gives his social business application away gratis. "It's a radical idea to both make it fun and give the application away for free, and support it with advertising," he tells the camera. "Advertising is a critical part of Spiceworks success and how we make money. It's also how we pay the bills. We have over 34 employees."
  
• The two impossibly cute twin daughters of Jeff Nelson, the proprietor of the vegetarian site Vegsource.com, say that advertising "pays for our family's food, our house, cars, our school, and most importantly, our dance lessons!"
  
• Two other stars of the documentary, Hetal and Anuja, describe how they left their jobs when their children were born, but then, seeking "something that was meaningful and at the same time gave us a sense of accomplishment," they launched the ad-supported and mouthwatering Indian cooking site Showmethecurry.com.

Analysts estimate there are as many as 1.2 million Web sites that support themselves by selling advertising, through their own sales forces or ad networks. Most of them constitute the vaunted "long tail" -- small sites serving the refined interests of niche audiences, whose existence is premised on the Internet's near-barrierless opportunity to create and distribute content. But the term "long tail," based as it is on such abstruse mathematical concepts as Pareto's law, can seem bloodless. It hardly does justice to the countless lives made better because of the ad-supported Internet.

That's where IAB came in. We made a seven-minute movie to put a human face on the long tail. We call it I Am the Long Tail, and here it is:

Engine of Business

Actually, I lied. The IAB didn't make this documentary about the long tail. The long tail made the movie about itself.

We reached out to sites we'd come across, and to online networks, for help in showcasing the almost limitless diversity of the ad-supported Internet. Our purposes were varied. As I noted in the YouTube video I made (I even downloaded the software that turned my Macbook into a Teleprompter) seeking contributions to our documentary, "The IAB wants advertisers to understand that small publishers are a foundation of their businesses -- that you're a vital channel to reach the American consumer. We also want policymakers and regulators in Washington and our state capitals to recognize that small digital publishers are critical to American economic growth, nationally, and in every Congressional district.

"Interactive advertising has become one of the greatest engines of small business development in American history," I said. "Whether you're a blog, a 'zine, a hobbyist site, a social network, a news publisher, a video channel; whether your specialty is recipes, sports, entertainment, child-rearing, or local affairs -- if you're supported by advertising, we want you to get the recognition you deserve."

Some three dozen publishers responded -- Yanier Gonzalez of the gamer site Destructoid.com; Daryn Kagan, the creator of Darynkagan.com, "the Web's one-stop destination for inspiring news"; the gift exchange Elfster; the Islamic lifestyle site Muxlim; Tampa's Karen Post, co-founder of the "creative engine" Oddpodz; others -- following our admonition to send us a two-minute video telling the world about themselves, their sites, their lives, and the role advertising plays in their personal reinvention.

Enticingly, we offered an HD Flip Camera to the creators of the three best videos.

Crazily, we told them to video themselves with any device available -- "camcorder, mobile phone, flipcam, whatever" -- and to send us their work in any format they cared to, whether .mov, .avi, or mpeg.

Lucky, it worked.

Downturn Startups

What was most striking about the publishers we encountered was their sheer passion for their subject matter. "I started askthebuilder.com because I wanted people to discover the right way to do things around their home,"says Tim Carter, the former contractor who launched the popular house and home site.

Mr. Gonzalez similarly -- and personally -- felt an untapped hunger in the marketplace. "We basically built a community of enthusiast writers who are outside the traditional gaming press," he says, referencing his own sensibility as a gamer who wanted more than he could otherwise find online. "It's a completely different take, a consumer take, the outside looking in."

What unites them with so many others is that the Internet has become the gateway to their economic salvation. Indeed, the Web constitutes one of the "peculiarities to this wave of downturn startups," The New York Times reported in a Page One story last week about one of this recession's few silver linings. "The Internet has given people an extraordinary tool not just to market their ideas but also to find business partners and suppliers, and to do all kinds of functions on the cheap."

"If I didn't have the online advertising revenue stream, Askthebuilder probably would have folded a long time ago," Mr. Carter says in his homemade video. "Online advertising has absolutely enhanced the living standard of my family."

A Curious Controversy

Why would these paeans to advertising be controversial? It's not clear, but they are. When Mediapost "broke" the story of the IAB video on Wednesday -- almost a month after we debuted it in front of 500 people at our IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Orlando, and more than two months after my call-for-entries was posted on YouTube -- the trade publication said it's "part of what appears to be a lobbying effort aimed at heading off regulation." That prompted anti-advertising activist Jeff Chester to tell the publication that our video was an "extremely disingenuous piece of work."

"Clearly we're going to have to respond with counter-programming,"Mr. Chester said.

I'm not sure what such counter-programming might be. A documentary called "Death to Small Businesses," perhaps? Or maybe "Long Live the Recession"?

Ah, well, let me be as explicit as possible. IAB's goal is to promote the growth of interactive advertising, which we believe to be a boon to the American economy and a rare bright light in terrible economic times. We believe the growth of ad-supported long tail publishers -- many of them in turn supported by small marketers who wouldn't be able to reach their markets without interactive advertising -- represents the potential for an economic renaissance in the U.S. As have virtually all advertisers since the dawn of the discipline, we believe that well-targeted advertising -- ads that are relevant to consumers' interests and needs -- is better, more respectful, and more productive than the irrelevant advertising known as spam. Consumers believe that, too!

And we believe, along with all our partners across the marketing-media ecosystem, that relevant advertising can be, must be, and is being created and delivered, on large sites and small, with full respect for consumers' privacy and security -- which is why we've partnered with a half dozen trade associations representing thousands of companies to back meaningful self-regulation of consumer privacy rights and expectations on the ad-supported Internet.

We're not being disingenuous: Citizens have every reason to be concerned about personal privacy, the security of their medical and financial records, and the incursion of governments, businesses, and individuals into their personal lives. But as we've shown in many previous postings on this clog and elsewhere, some current Federal and state proposals would seek to put many forms of traditional advertising research, including the use of impersonal, anonymous information, under a strict regulatory regime that would hurt consumer advertising and marketing. The New York Times, whose reporters have become persistent proponents of Internet regulation, last week proposed using "a bull’s-eye or maybe some sort of creepy eyeball" on ads that use any type of behavioral data in making ads more relevant to users.

So no, we don't want governments mandating the use of "creepy eyeballs" as a warning system for advertising. We want to secure consumer privacy and help businesses grow - which are not now and never have been mutually exclusive. And yes, we want to show the types of small businesses that would be harmed if unthinking government regulation is enacted.

But mostly, we want to celebrate the small publishers and marketers who have been able to launch businesses into a recession because of the tools and services enabling them on the Web. As our video says, they are using interactive advertising "to turn their dreams into the American dream."

Send Us Videos

And we're not done. I Am the Long Tail is a work in progress. We want to continue to collect examples of the diversity of the ad-supported Internet from across America and the world. If you run a small Web site supported by advertising, tell us about yourself. Same rules apply:

• Create a two-minute video about you and your long tail Web site
• Tell us about your site's purpose, content, uniqueness and audience
• Tell us why you started your digital publication
• Describe the site's value to you and your audience
• Explain the role advertising plays in your digital publication
• Provide a logo, screenshot, and "environmental" shots
• Keep it two minutes or under
• One change from before: We prefer it in .mov -- Quicktime video -- format, and under 100 megs, if possible.
  

Send it to Chris@iab.net. We'll plan on featuring you on our new site, currently under construction, Iamthelongtail.com. There are no more Flipcams to give away (Vegsource, ShowMeTheCurry, AsktheBuilder, and Destructoid won those) but you'll be part of a great showcase for the American dream.

As Yanier Gonzalez, gamer turned entrepreneur creator of Destructoid, put it, "It would have been impossible for me to launch something this size without advertising."

The Interactive Creative Revolution Is Here!

Thanks to Advertising Age, I've had a chance recently to reflect on my favorite advertising and marketing books of all time. Alas, the book I believe is the best did not make the Top 10 list. It is Strategy in Advertising: Matching Media and Messages to Markets and Motivations by Leo Bogart.

First published in 1967, Strategy in Advertising remains the best single-volume work on the science of media mix modeling and allocation. That's not surprising, because its author was a brilliant and widely respected social scientist, who for years served as the executive vice president of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau and the de facto dean of media researchers in the United States. Bogart (who died in 2005) was of that generation of sociologists who saw both the bad and the good that managed communications can do. Born in Poland, his observations as an American soldier in Europe at the end of World War II -- his confrontation with the horrifying results of Nazi propaganda -- prompted him to become a sociologist. Among his post-war projects was the research that underlay the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces.

I mention Bogart's background and his grounding in science because the second page of his classic book on advertising strategy contains one of the most contrarian lines ever written by a scientist. "Advertisements," he writes, "may be evaluated scientifically; they cannot be created scientifically."

Leo Bogart no doubt would be amused that, some four decades after he penned his great book, we're still fighting the old art vs. science war in advertising. But we are -- and it's a war worth ending, because it misses the point entirely.

Two weeks ago, I published a clog titled, "A Bigger Idea: A Manifesto on Interactive Advertising Creativity." The observations and hypotheses -- that our direct response heritage has hindered this medium's hospitality to brand advertisers, that we must incentivize creative excellence, that we need to integrate technologists as full partners into creative teams -- apparently have resonated.

Ah, hell -- they became the talk of the clogosphere, and for that we're extremely grateful. The French Revolution began in salons and coffee shops, so no reason the interactive creative revolution can't begin here!

We furthered the cause subsequently at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Orlando, FL -- the Ecosystem 2.0 conference, as we call it -- earlier this week. There, I disclosed that, for the first time, IAB will invite creative agencies into the interactive advertising format standardization process. We also announced the formation of IAB's first Agency Advisory Board, with senior executive representatives from a dozen top creative, digital and media agencies, including:

• Brad Brinegar, Chairman and CEO of McKinney, and Chair of the Agency Advisory Board
• Tom Bedecarré, CEO, AKQA
• Jeff Benjamin, Interactive Creative Director, Crispin Porter + Bogusky Advertising
• Alan Cohen, CEO of OMD USA, OMD Los Angeles.
• Colleen DeCourcy, Chief Digital Officer, TBWA Worldwide
• Brian DiLorenzo, Director of Integrated Production and Executive Director of Content, BBDO
• David Droga, Founder and Chairman, Droga5
• Sarah Fay, CEO, Carat North America
• Maria Luisa Francoli, Global CEO, MPG
• Jean-Philippe Maheu, Chief Digital Officer, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide
• Benjamin Palmer, Co-Founder, CEO, Barbarian Group
• Steve Wax, Partner and Chief Narratologist and Co-Founder, Campfire

But this is not a revolution against science, as some have characterized it. It's a war against the mismanagement of marketing communications by people who don't have the background or experience to help marketers use all the tools and services available to them to grow profitably. In that war, as IAB Chair Wenda Harris Millard put it so eloquently at our conference, both art and science have a place.

It's important for all of us who would offer our services to marketers and consumers to know how to arrange the seats at this table.

A Great Debate

I've loved the debate generated by our rants, diatribes and importunings. My special favorites include the passionate back-and-forth instigated by Adweek's Brian Morrissey on his @BMorrissey: thoughts on branding and advertising blog. Videoegg's Troy Young did a funny, heartfelt, and wonderful analysis of the online creative crisis on his company's blog. Silicon Alley Insider joined the fray with some terrific commentary and links.

But my favorite response was from Paul Seward, a senior interactive application engineer at the Martin Agency in Richmond, Virginia, and an inventor of the creative technology program at the VCU Brandcenter, one of the institutions that will save advertising -- and make interactive media hospitable to it. The Martin Agency is part of that core class of ad agencies that are and will be at the forefront of the interactive creative revolution: Its people understand not only what builds businesses, but what motivates clients, creatives and consumers -- and how those motivations must be aligned for advertising to succeed. The subject of my first "clog," Martin and its longtime president and creative director, Mike Hughes, were among the first to break down the walls between their direct response division and their "brand advertising" division, setting the stage for the agency's reinvention as a leader for the interactive era.

The Martin Agency and VCU Brandcenter are intertwined; Mr. Hughes is a founder and the chairman of school. So when one of his team wrote about the need to bring technology and creativity closer together, I listened. And what I heard from Paul Seward was a passion to lead a revolution that is grounded -- as he is, personally -- in both art and science. Here's what he wrote me:

Mr. Rothenberg,

I am one of the original contributors that helped Rick Boyko, Bob Greenberg, and Nick Law create the Creative Technology curriculum for the VCU Brandcenter. Mark Avnet and I have been working together to craft the new track to make it become something very special. I am teaching my second semester of classes and I am completely blown away by what the students are coming up with. Their thinking is amazing. Thinking beyond the tactical execution with their ideas and developing platforms that are seated in the idea of the experience. It really is extraordinary!

I also work at The Martin Agency. Currently I am one of those guys that are “working in a different room” as George Lois once said. I am within the interactive department and currently act as a Information Architect, Producer, Programmer, System Administrator, Software Architect and sometimes even graphic designer. See, I am one of those graphic designers that saw the power of the Internet as a medium and left the practice to pursue programming in 1994. Prior to that I was a lead graphic designer of a national magazine and before that a graduate of VCU’s acclaimed Communications Arts and Design, Graphic Design school. But, as a programmer, I excelled very quickly. Going on to become a enterprise developer with the J2EE language. I then moved on to become a Software Project Manager/Architect. It was the advent of advertising starting to take the deep dive into technology that lured me back to my creative roots. At the Martin Agency, I get to experience the best of all of my worlds. I can intermingle my extensive technical experience with my creative side. It really is a unique marriage. But, it is this unique type of individuals that we are looking for at VCU’s Brandcenter. And I am happy to say, we have found students that fill this bill.

Like you, I believe that the Creative Technologist should have a seat at the creative table Throughout the complete ideation stage. But, I think there needs to be some level-setting done before that happens. First, I am not talking about these creative technologists as traditional strategist, programmers, information architects, or even digital designers. Mark Avnet and I believe that they are more closely defined as “experience managers”. They have a understanding of traditional branding and advertising. But, they also have a deep understanding of personal interaction. How the tribe interacts with each other and how a brand can quickly adapt its messaging in response to user actions and responses.

These new principles are easily defined by saying words like adaptive design, information design, data visualization, etc. But, look deeper at the core of what this new creative team member brings to the table. A deeps sense of how people interact with each other. Thinking of the brand as “within the community” (please do not confuse this with having a brand play within Facebook), talking, listening and reacting to the needs of its community. But, this thinking is what separates this type of individual from someone who may recommend the latest technological animation tactic. This kind of tactical ideation is not what a CT does. They understand what may be possible, but they think and concept in a much more generalized fashion.

Take Nike+, R/GA was able to take the idea of recording pedometer results and create a platform that allows many different forms of communication to flourish. A platform based on uniting “like minded” individuals within a experience brought to them by the brand. Allowing them to become apart of the brand and living within its experience. But, it is the value of this type of engagement that is so powerful. TV, online, events, OOH, all tactical executions that evolved easily from the initial platform idea. To me, that is what is so revolutionary about the Nike+ campaign. Not the piece of tech that goes in your shoe.

The industry is at a crossroad today. What we do in the next couple years is going to redefine our work and culture for the next 60 years. It really is an exciting time for us all.

Thanks, Paul Seward

I can't be any more eloquent than Mr. Seward, but I can try to summarize his thinking: Whether their medium is the written word, the designed image, the produced event, or the software application -- whether their grounding is in science or in art -- great advertising people share a common trait: They know what moves people.

Or as the late, great advertising scientist Leo Bogart wrote 42 years ago: "The Great Idea in advertising is far more than the sum of the recognition scores, the ratings, and all other superficial indicators of its success; it is in the realm of myth, to which measurements cannot apply."

Viva la Revolucion!

The New York Times vs. the Internet

There's been a skein of stories in The New York Times about the Internet and consumer privacy which, if I didn't know better, I'd swear were assigned and written deliberately to heighten public fears and promote support for broad, ill-considered Federal regulation.

The weirdest piece so far is in today's paper -- a distortion so odd that you wonder if anyone read the copy before putting it into print. A "Link by Link" column by reporter Noam Cohen, and headlined "As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes," the article purports to draw a direct connection between anonymous Web usage behaviors and the revelation that New York Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez once used steroids.

Rodriguez, says The Times's Mr. Cohen, "is "at the cutting edge of another scourge -- the growing encroachment on privacy." He continues:

The way Mr. Rodriguez’s positive steroid test result became public followed a path increasingly common in the computer age: third-party data collection. We are typically told that personal information is anonymously tracked for one reason — usually something abstract like making search results more accurate, recommending book titles or speeding traffic through the toll booths on the thruways. But it is then quickly converted into something traceable to an individual, and potentially life-changing.

From this, the reporter goes on to claim that Internet users are at risk through their IP addresses, and argue that "online service providers — social networks, search engines, blogs and the like — should voluntarily destroy what they collect, to avoid the kind of legal controversies the baseball players’ union is now facing." He concludes by decrying “the surveillance business model," which he explicitly connects to behavioral advertising on the Web: "There is money to be made," Mr. Cohen says, describing this suspect strategy, "from knowing your customers well — with a depth unimaginable before Internet cookies allowed companies to track obsessively online behavior."

Mr. Cohen's argument is almost a textbook example of a false syllogism. Every inference in his article is inaccurate. In the news pages of The Times, he's written the kind of unsupported, biased editorial that shouldn't make its way into a high school broadsheet.

The Rodriguez case had nothing to do with anonymous data, third parties, behavioral targeting, Internet cookies, or interactive media. The Yankees' star was outed through classic gumshoe reporting by Sports Illustrated, which tied him specifically to a failed drug examination by a testing firm. As SI made abundantly clear in breaking the scandal on February 7, "Rodriguez's name appears on a list of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball's '03 survey testing." No fewer than four sources corroborated his misconduct to the magazine.

A Coursing Meme

Why the leap in logic that ties solid investigative reporting about a public figure's misbehavior to behavioral advertising on the Web? I'm beginning to think there's a meme coursing through the newspaper of record -- and many other mainstream publications -- that's not providing due consideration for a complex story. That is, some reporters and editors have concluded that consumer privacy rights and expectations are being de facto violated, and so have decided to press for de jure solutions.

I'm sensitive because I love The Times, can't imagine my life without it -- in paper -- every morning, and can't stand this tendency that's been creeping into its pages. About a year ago, The Times published an editorial by a member of its Editorial Board calling for an opt-in standard for all interactive advertising. The very act of interactive advertising, wrote editorialist Adam Cohen, is tantamount to "spying on users" -- even if, as I've written previously, the offense involves only the use of the types of demographic data that The Times and its advertisers have been using for decades.

Then, earlier this week, The Times was among the few major news organizations that, in reporting the Federal Trade Commission's release of behavioral advertising guidelines, failed to make any mention that major industry groups had been engaged in a long-term effort to forge comprehensive self-regulation of interactive media and marketers. I complained privately to The Times's Bits Blog editor and writer Saul Hansell, who reported the FTC's announcement. He opted to publish part of my complaint -- and his response -- in his blog. (I'm happy to publish our full correspondence, including my typos -- but won't, unless Mr. Hansell gives his permission.)

In contrast to, say, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Business Week, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Mr. Hansell's report contained no reaction from any interactive media company, nor made any mention, as I wrote him, "of the self-regulatory initiative launched - and in process for many months - by ANA, AAAA, IAB, DMA, and CBBB, which together formally represent thousands of companies." Nor did he cite the other major self-regulatory program, the Network Advertising Initiative,which has been around for nearly a decade.

The organizations acronymed above are the Association of National Advertisers, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Direct Marketing Association, and the Council of Better Business Bureaus. The CBBB is helping the other associations with our formal self-regulatory efforts.

"I'm not asking for free passes, guaranteed quotes, 'fair and balanced,' or any other such crap," I wrote Mr. Hansell. "You can be as tough as your reporting allows you to be. But the omission of these basic facts about self-regulation in a piece ABOUT self-regulation simply misrepresents the content and character of the existing debate and activity."

His emailed response to me: "Good point, but not so simple."

Unthinking Bias

But it is simple. An unthinking bias is creeping into a great deal of mainstream reporting that seeks, sometimes explicitly, to thread together the basic structure of Internet communications, the functions of marketing and advertising, and Bush Administration surveillance programs, into a thick rope of fear contrived to hang an entire industry. Little of this is deliberate -- but you can't help believe that the wild biases exposed by The Times's "Rodriguez = Internet Dangers!" fantasy reflects the deep-seated fears among print journalists about their business's transformation.

There's a deep, unfortunate irony to much of this. Print journalists have been writing quite a lot lately about how the competitive demand for speed and scoops when operating in "Internet time" can, if not contained, cause more inaccuracies (and more virally-induced embarrassment) in the news business. The American public, they argue, deserves and requires the deliberation that the 24-hour news cycle once provided. Setting aside the fact that breaking news, instant analysis, competitive scooping, and their attendant inaccuracies have been with us since the dawn of radio if not earlier, I agree. That is why we have, over the decades, subdivided the news business into contextual segments, and distinguished, for example, quality broadsheets that strived for accuracy and probity at any cost from tabloids that trafficked in the prurient.

In today's journalistic environment of heightened fear, however, even the quality channels are besotted by prurient Internet hype and beset by tabloid-style alarmism.

Don't for minute mistake what I'm saying: There must be a real debate about interactive media and privacy -- and real actions by companies. Rightly or wrongly, public opinion will establish the boundaries of what the private sector can and should do. Interactive media, advertising agencies, marketers, research firms, and technology suppliers have kept their heads in the sand for too long: We have avoided engaging our customers in discussion and debate about our practices and their needs. We've enveloped our privacy policies in rings of legalese, and buried them several clicks down on too many Web sites. We have allowed the purveyors of technological wonders to dominate the conversation, heedless of how some of their marvels might generate worry in the population at large.

A lot of it is unfair. But because our companies have absented themselves from this necessary conversation, we've allowed activists with anti-commercial agendas to dominate the discussion. These activists have the ear of the journalists, because they talk, and we don't. As a result, in the public mind, there is less and less distinction among spyware, malware, worms, viruses, medical records disclosure, financial records breaches, government surveillance -- and catalogue marketing, magazine subscription list brokering, credit card usage, coupon redemptions, pop-ups ads, banner ads, click-throughs, and behavioral advertising. The anti-business activists, their enablers in the media, and their surrogates in state and Federal bodies are bunching it all together into -- as The Times editorial headlined it -- "spying on users."

Out of moral sense and business logic, our companies must love our consumers and adapt to their needs and desires. That is why our several trade associations and their major member companies have banded together to create -- we hope -- an effective self-regulatory program to protect consumer privacy rights and expectations in interactive media. Because if we don't, the Government will -- and based on the way the public conversation is going, what results will not be helpful to consumers or companies. So in that sense, I'm perversely happy about the growing volume of flawed reporting, the biased editorials, and the like. It's reminding us that attention must be paid.

I've never read a dumber story than The Times's linkage of the outing of Alex Rodriguez to interactive advertising. But dumb stories can kill.

"A Bigger Idea":
A Manifesto on Interactive Advertising Creativity

Quick -- name four fantastic, emotionally resonant, culturally significant and successful interactive advertising campaigns from the past year.

Came up empty? That's what I thought. Palo Alto, we've got a problem.

Actually, Palo Alto may be the problem. Fifteen years old, a vital component of the marketing landscape by any calculation, interactive advertising is still characterized in the public eye and practitioners' minds by its technical sleight-of-hand instead of its narrative and emotive power. This has led our industry to a creative crisis that, if not resolved, will almost certainly impede our -- and our customers' -- growth.

It's time to engage marketers, agencies, and publishers in a public debate about creativity in interactive advertising. The IAB has set aside much of our February 22-24 Annual Leadership Conference in Orlando, Florida, for this discussion. But if you'll indulge me, I'd like to launch the debate right here by naming names -- the four enemies of online branding:

• A direct-marketing culture and tradition that devalues creativity and its long-term effect on brands
  
• An interactive agency business model that disincentivizes greatness and fails to penalize mediocrity
• An unwillingness by mainstream agencies to integrate technologists as full partners in the advertising creative team
• Media industry values and habits that malign and depreciate our own products, and by extension our customers'
  

The Banner Shibboleth

The issue of brand advertising and its future in interactive media is particularly prominent now, as the U.S. struggles through its worsening economic crisis. With much of marketing spend frozen, mainstream media suffering from significant advertising dropoffs, and interactive ad growth slowing, the blame game has become a desperate pastime in our industry, especially from premium publishers trying to maintain pricing on their display inventory.

The latest shibboleth is the online banner ad, whose formats IAB members first began standardizing more than a decade ago and subsequently realized in the "Universal Ad Package" in 2003. Industry chatter recently has begun to attribute pricing pressure to the mere existence of these standard ad units. New York Times "Bits Blog" columnist Saul Hansell this week related an encounter with MSNBC.com President Charlie Tillinghast, who told him that "that the standard sizes have allowed the advertising networks to turn display ads into commodities."

"We made it possible for any Web site to run ads through the ad networks," Mr. Tillinghast told Mr. Hansell. "That's created an oversupply of space."

On the one hand, the charge is literally true: Standardization of anything -- the ASCII character-encoding scheme, the North American 15A/125V ungrounded electrical plug and socket, the IEEE/ANSI Performance Criteria for Alarming Personal Radiation Detectors for Homeland Security -- turns it into a commodity, "an article of commerce or a product that can be used for commerce." There are many types of commodities characterized by natural or artificial standards -- coal, oil, currencies and, of course, pork bellies, to name a few.

On the other hand, the charge, in relation to advertising, is historically jejune. Blaming Internet banner standards for commoditization is no different than attributing television advertising pricing fluctuations to standardization of the 30-second spot, or faulting the magazine page for the pressures on magazine advertising.

Indeed, the accusation ignores the very reason IAB members -- including such historic beneficiaries of advertising standards as The New York Times and CBS -- developed the ad standards in the first place: to reduce the complexity and transaction costs associated with interactive advertising, and allow the medium to scale. "The Internet is taking an important step in its evolution as an ad medium by moving in this direction of standard ad sizes," Richy Glassberg, then the Vice President and General Manager of Interactive Sales for Turner Broadcasting, said when the first IAB banner standards were introduced in 1996. "This will make it easier for agencies and advertisers to develop advertising and will further establish the Web as a viable mass medium."

Endorsing those standards, Mike Donahue of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, said, "The proliferation of banners has created a massive problem for advertisers and their agencies, which sometimes have to create their ads in 50 or more sizes. These voluntary guidelines will greatly streamline the advertising production and placement process and contribute to the overall growth of Internet advertising."

Supply vs. Demand

Mr. Tillinghast (who has built MSNBC.com into a national and global news powerhouse) is also wrong in attributing the "oversupply of space" to standardization. The disequilibrium in the supply and demand for advertising inventory has a more fundamental cause: technology itself. As I noted in my first presentation to the IAB Board of Directors, using research we conducted at the consulting firm Booz & Co. in the early 2000's on behalf of the Association of National Advertisers and some media clients, it is now possible for a 14-year-old to create a global television network with the applications that come built into her laptop computer. That means that, for perhaps the first time in any industry, new product -- in our case, content and advertising inventory -- can be created and distributed seamlessly, without friction, and largely without marginal cost.

To prove the point, just look at another industry standard that's helped a commodity proliferate in recent years: ICANN's Web site naming conventions. Thanks to it (and that other contributing standard, Internet Protocol), there are now approximately 160 million Web sites in the world -- some 1.2 million of which sell advertising.

This isn't to deny that oversupply is a problem. It is. But short of a shutdown of the Internet itself -- a ban against new domain names, an ICANN moratorium, or mass public revulsion against a medium that is now the world's most popular -- new supply will always be entering this marketplace.

Yet in the very notion of commoditization lies the salvation for interactive advertising. For as in all other commodity markets, the products can be shaped and modified in ways that add enormous value to them. Raw diamonds can be polished to perfection. Cotton balls can be woven into couture dresses. Pork bellies can be sauteed into haute cuisine.

And advertising inventory can be written, designed, and produced by immensely talented creative people into communications that drive the fortunes of great companies.

Direct Response Culture

Can be... But for the most part isn't. Given the remarkable creative potential in interactivity, online media should present a cornucopia of fabulous, affecting and effective advertising. Take the great concepting and design that went into Doyle Dane's "Think Small" ad for Volkswagen, spoon in the equivalently brilliant production simplicity of Chiat/Day's "Human Cartoons" campaign for the Nynex Yellow Pages, throw in the remarkable production values that for two generations characterized BBDO's work for Pepsi, sprinkle over it the captivating long copy Ogilvy wrote for Rolls-Royce -- and then add the potential for mass viral video distribution, one-to-one validation, social media engagement, blog conversation, customization on premium news and entertainment sites, and segmented reach through online networks. The marketing mind boggles.

So with all that potential, why is that so few people can name even two great, recent interactive advertising campaigns -- so few people in our own industry? (For those tempted to respond, "Hey, wait a minute, what about 'Subservient Chicken?'", I feel compelled to point out that this breakthrough effort by Crispin Porter Bogusky for Burger King is five years old.)

Culprit no. 1, I believe, is the direct-marketing culture that is part of interactive advertising's DNA. Lord knows, we should and do revere direct response advertising and most of what it's bequeathed to the interactive industry. From the DR industry we've derived our attention to accountability -- an obligation honored only in the breach through the history of mainstream media and agencies. From direct marketing we have learned that data and its management are central to everything we do. Many of the growth areas for interactive publishers, including lead generation and customer relationship management, are based on direct marketing innovations.

But direct marketers are almost defiantly disinterested in the aesthetics of communications -- and the long-term impact aesthetics has on brand value and company activities. Notwithstanding such legendary direct marketing efforts as American Express's -- where every element of the brand is supported through all channels, from main media to direct -- even direct mailers will say that creativity, designed to build and reinforce such well-established, long-term brand-uplifting effects as "likeability," is not native to the direct response business. Attention to beauty is more the exception than the rule in a marketing-services segment that prizes today's response to today's offer over long-term brand lift.

This isn't a criticism, but a reflection of the way the marketing mix is supposed to work, and has worked for decades. When I first visited the fabled Publisher's Clearing House in Port Washington, Long Island 20 years ago, I was shocked at the contrast between their clinical understanding of the "what" and their utter detachment from the "why." PCH's 12 writers and four art directors were involved continuously in developing new mailing "involvement devices" -- pre-Internet instigators of what we today call "consumer engagement" -- and, through rigorous testing, could tell down to fractions of a percentage point the lift to gross revenues each would provide.

But how such devices as the "television tag" and the "Jaguar stamp" worked to influence consumers, and what the implications were for the magazines that used PCH to boost subscriptions -- that the direct marketers could not say.

"Don't Know Why"

''If you use a manila envelope, people respond more than they do to a white envelope, but we don't know why,'' Lee Epstein, president of Mailmen Inc., a Long Island company that inserts materials in direct-mail envelopes, told me at the time. ''The postage-paid stamp in the upper-right-hand corner - someone once made a mistake and tilted it. It increased response, but we don't know why."

Almost everyone in magazine publishing can relate a horror story about how direct marketing's ingrained disdain for beauty and branding sundered a property -- how a circulation department for an elegant fashion or furnishings periodical, intent on meeting a mailing response target, flooded low-income neighborhoods with cheap come-ons, driving the publication's demographics downward and turning off the very advertisers the magazine was supposed to attract. "Most direct-mail letters, they said, don't use good writing; don't worry if you split an infinitive," Frank H. Johnson, a direct mail pioneer who began his career at Time Inc. in the 1930's, once told me. "And you're never supposed to be funny."

Bill Jayme, one of the greatest direct mail writers of the past century, agreed. ''The general attitude in direct mail is to talk down, assume people are stupid and repeat everything,'' he told me nearly 20 years ago. The late Mr. Jayme was a rare exception. "I haven't had any qualms about using a word like 'peregrinations.' If the context is right, the reader'll understand and will feel flattered.''

But this notion that your consumer was part of a community of interest with the brand marketer, not a "target" to turn into a "conquest" at any cost, was and is rare in direct marketing. The late, great magazine journalist Clay Felker once related to me the struggles he, Harold Hayes, and others charged with reinventing Esquire magazine in the early 1960's had persuading the publication's proprietors to abandon the "damn it letter" -- the long-time direct mail control missive that opened with those words and chortled over pinup girls. However damaging this legacy of Esquire's earlier girlie magazine days was to the rebranding effort the newcomers were charged with spearheading, the publisher was reluctant to change it, because it brought in subscribers. Mr. Felker succeeded in his effort only when he retained Mr. Jayme, who wrote an intelligent letter that finally outperformed the debilitating "damn it letter."

Why Creativity Matters

Agency founder David Ogilvy revered direct marketing, yet also was the ad industry's leading apostle of brand imagery. In his marvelous new biography of Ogilvy, The King of Madison Avenue, former Ogilvy & Mather Chairman and Chief Executive Kenneth Roman relates how, for years, Ogilvy (shown at left) struggled to reconcile these "two schools of advertising" that "were diametrically opposed to each other."

By the time Ogilvy founded his agency in 1948, he had succeeded. As committed as he was to the principle that advertising must sell, Ogilvy also understood the risks posed by a fixation on immediacy and accountability -- primarily the brand marketer's loss of public esteem and the ability it bestowed to maintain pricing power. In remarks made 50 years ago that seem eerily prescient today, Ogilvy told the author Martin Mayer:

"Most brands that need help today were given sleazy, bargain-basement brand images in the thirties, when money was scarce and it was a great help to seem cheap. They've suffered from it. When I first came into this country Packard was one of the great quality cars. Then they began getting tough, going after the middle-priced market. What do you think they would give today to get back their old image?'

To marketers and others who complained that brand-image advertising "is unmeasurable, it's all a lot of airy-fairy nonsense," Ogilvy had a simple response: "Well, is it?"

Ogilvy was one of the last century's great salesmen. In his book, Mr. Roman spins wonderful yarns about the hours "DO" spent as an apprentice chef in the kitchen of the Majestic Hotel, one of Paris's best restaurants, and the years he spent peddling Aga cookers, a premium stove, door to door across Scotland, in the 1930's. What Ogilvy learned from these experiences is that successful selling is at root about one thing: faith -- your ability to provide to others a dream with infinite horizens. The exquisitely designed plate of cuisine classique -- ah yes, you are living the good life! This remarkable stove -- why, your home will be akin to the finest restaurant!

Creating Faith

In taking this lesson to his agency, Ogilvy also understood that creating faith in customers was not a distant exercise; he would not succeed solely by delivering creatively constructed messages across pages or airwaves to a faceless mass of consumers. There was always a more immediate, more present customer: the clients themselves.

This is perhaps the most important reason advertising creativity matters. It inspires the marketer. It encourages the sales force. It provides them, and all the other constituencies in and around the company and the brand, the faith that they will be able to sell the product in to the retailer, close the sales on the dealer's lot, win new commissions, and better their own lives. Great advertising is their rallying cry, the flag they march under. The mouseclick must be matched by their heartbeat.

This is the reason no major new advertising campaign ever debuts de novo on broadcast network television, but rather is premiered at the franchisees' convention, the national dealers' conference, and the annual sales meeting. The campaign, the ads, are the gospels -- the stories that excite and unite the tribes, that spur them to go out and do battle for a higher cause. Done right, an advertising campaign transforms the advertiser itself into an army of true believers. For how can you expect to win new converts, if you, yourself, are not a true believer?

The notion that a narrative could be used to drive people toward higher goals is as old as philosophy itself. As Socrates says in concluding the myth of the cave in Plato's Republic: "Without having seen the Form of Good and having fixed his eye upon it, one will not be able to act wisely, either in public affairs or in private life."

Jerry Della Femina described this cultural power -- this corporate cultural power -- of great advertising more profanely but no less profoundly in his famous book, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor. "The client is standing up there waiting at the train station for the New Haven to take him into New York and he's dying to be stopped by his buddies," Mr. Della Femina wrote in his classic memoir. "He is dying for them to compliment him on his new campaign."

"'Boy, you've got a hell of an ad there.' That's what the client wants to hear."

Missing Reputational Currency

The gap between the mouseclick and the heartbeat is nowhere more evident than in many of our digital advertising agencies. To illustrate, allow me to pose an admittedly trick question: What's the biggest difference between a traditional creative agency and a new-age digital agency?

Answer: Traditional creative agencies are named after human beings. Digital agencies are named after inanimate objects or nonsense words.

Check out the winners of the 2008 IAB MIXX Awards -- the industry's premier showcase for creativity and effectiveness. Winner, Best in Show: Tequila. Winner, Brand Positioning: Digitas. Winner, In-Game Advertising: Jogo. Silver Award, Brand Positioning: Blockdot. Silver Award, Digital Video: Tribal DDB.

Look, we love these agencie. And to be fair to them, the depersonalization of advertising predated the digital revolution. But it's a particular tragedy in the digital arena, because it has robbed the industry of its most potent fuel: reputation capital.

From their inception in the 19th Century, advertising agencies, like law and accounting firms, represented their origins and duties as client service businesses in their names. "N. W. Ayer & Son," "Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne," "Young & Rubicam" -- all implied a sense of personal responsibility on the part of founders to their customers.

Not incidentally, they also conveyed a sense of opportunity to their ambitious employees. Advertising was always a low-barrier-to-entry business. If success depended solely on the ability "to render service and make money," as Lord & Thomas leader Albert Lasker once put it, why, anyone could try it!

And they did -- at no time more prolifically than during the Creative Revolution of the 1960's. The concurrent post-war Baby Boom, suburbanization of America, and spread of network television put a special premium on quality advertising content; more products and more communications channels meant more ads, and more need to cut through the growing clutter to engage audiences. Writers and graphic designers determined that they, too, might have value -- perhaps more value than account handlers. So writers like David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach (shown right) and graphic designers like George Lois took the plunge and founded agencies.

Cultural recognition and financial growth rapidly came their way, emboldening other creatives to believe they could trade the personal reputations they had won using little more than their pens and palettes into successful agencies. The "swinging agencies," Jerry Della Femina called them: Wells, Rich, Greene; Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller; Smith/Greenland; Daniel & Charles. Many were spawned directly from the creative department of Doyle Dane Bernbach. Between January and July 1969 alone, more than 100 ad shops were launched, most in New York, all of them gassed up with reputational capital.

Agency Road Map

The calculation was clear and direct: Get known as the creator of great, successful campaigns, and you, too, could start your own business, bring some clients along, and make an awful lot of money on little capital investment. And to this day, that remains the road map for success in the agency business. If you want to understand why the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival has become the largest destination gathering of advertising professionals in the world -- "more than 10,000 delegates from 85 countries... inspired by the 28,000 pieces of work on display," as its Web site says -- that's all you need to know.

And that's the reason to mourn, and perhaps war against, the depersonalization of the agency business. Sure, there are several valid explanations for it: to scale, advertising had to globalize and industrialize; and increasingly, one could maintain that successful client service is about the team, not the individual.

But if, as I have argued, great advertising not only stimulates consumers but galvanizes that team to build and sustain strong companies and brands, then we must recognize that its creation requires both collaboration and individual achievement. Advertising, in this regard, is no different from any other form of communication that seeks after broad, material, cultural impact -- no different than film, or theatre, or journalism: If stardom is not rewarded, there is little incentive toward superiority. Worse, perhaps, if mediocrity is not penalized, there is little deterrence to decline.

There's good news lurking beneath the surface. The rising category of digital advertising award winners -- agencies making the hearts beat and the mice click -- are the great creative agencies of the past two decades: Hill Holliday, Goodby Silverstein, McKinney, BBDO, TBWA Chiat/Day -- companies whose names (or, well, acronyms) have meaning.

But we must unleash and laud by name the next generation of stars. Interactive advertising, I suspect, will only take its place in the cathedrals of cultural significance when we start to recognize and reward the creative individuals who make greatness happen.

Creative Technologists Arise

Those individuals carry at least one non-traditional title. To the advertising creative partnership that traditionally has teamed a copywriter and an art director, a third member must be added: the creative technologist.

The creative technologist is only now beginning to gain public recognition. Google the term and you'll find hundreds of help wanted ads at agencies and publishers. But I'd never seen the phrase in the mainstream media until two weeks ago, when New York Magazine writer Emily Nussbaum published an exciting piece about the transformation of uptown rival The New York Times. "There is something exhilarating about watching web innovation finally explode at The Times," she wrote. "... Everyone seems to have a job title like 'creative technologist,' giving the entire floor a mad-scientist air."

Yet these are not mad scientists; they are essential partners in modern media, central to the craft of communication today. Creative technologists, says Mark Avnet, professor and head of a training program for them at Virginia Commonwealth University's VCU Brandcenter, are "fluent and confident in using media technologies appropriately in the service of branding, advertising, marketing and persuasion." VCU's program -- the world's first at an accredited university, launched only six months ago -- aims to train "leaders and members in ‘new’ creative teams, as interactive designers, creative directors, producers, directors of interactive media, members of account teams, as entrepreneurs and in emerging creative technology positions in forward-thinking agencies.”

Among contemporary agency leaders, the only one who speaks publicly about the indispensability of creative technologists is RG/A Chairman, CEO and Global Chief Creative Officer Bob Greenberg.

"There are critical creative needs that didn't exist in the old advertising," says Mr. Greenberg, who counts 130 technologists in his New York office. "Advertising is no longer just about the display ad or the TV commercial or the banner; it's about creating meaningful tools and architecting user experiences. Our technology group, they can keep up to speed technically with the top people at HP or IBM. But they also understand how to work with others to create an application that will lead to community."

Mr. Greenberg stresses that calling the creative technologist the "third member" of the creative team is, at best, metaphorical. There are several new skill sets creative agencies today must possess to attract, engage, and influence consumers -- Flash video development, software design, information architecture, animation, CRM, iPhone app design, and ActionScript development among them -- and no one individual will have expertise in all. The point is that the men and women with these skills must be treated as full partners in the campaign development process, contributors to "the Big Idea," not as executional afterthoughts buried in the basement.

The Bigger Idea

This evolution of the creative partnership is as transformational a moment as was the invention of the copywriter-art director partnership exactly 60 years ago, at fledgling shop Doyle Dane Bernbach. Influenced by his former colleague, the legendary graphic designer Paul Rand, agency founder Bill Bernbach realized that effective persuasion required the full integration of words and images -- and of their expert creators.

"Up until that time in agencies, the art director was a layout man," George Lois, a Bernbach acolyte, once told me. "He may have been a very, very good layout man. He may have been a gifted layout man. But he was not a thinker. He was a layout man." So secondary were they that they worked in different rooms, often on different floors, than the copywriters, who referred to these layout men as "wrists."

"Before Bernbach, there were slogans, great lines, and they got laid out," Mr. Lois said. "Well, Bernbach didn't believe in catchy lines as much as he believed in attacking the heart and soul. So Bernbach gave the art director power."

Significantly, this occurred at the dawn of the last information revolution -- the introduction of broadcast network television, which also occurred exactly 60 years ago. The advent of the interactive revolution now heralds the empowerment of the creative technologist. Clearly, their ascent adds complexity to advertising agency and media management: Communications leaders will have to learn how to foster collaboration among larger and more diverse teams -- in addition to motivating their individual stars, as I've suggested is necessary. But agencies and media have no choice but to add them to their capability mix.

"You can't have an art director and a writer who go off for two weeks in a room and try to come up with a Big Idea that is rendered into a print ad or billboard, and the interactive accompaniment to that is just matched luggage," Mr. Greenberg says. "You have to get to a bigger idea. You now may need eight people around the table."

All That Remains

If you've had the good fortune to spend time in RG/A's Bauhaus-style headquarters on Manhattan's West Side, or a block away in the offices of New York Times Digital, or across the country at Google's campus in Mountainview, or a little bit north of that, in the AKQA agency's HQ across from AT&T Park in San Francisco, or across the country again, in the converted tobacco factory that houses the transforming McKinney agency in Durham, NC, you'll be struck immediately by all this creative ferment -- this reinvention of the way we communicate the world and persuade consumers.

Yet that is not the conversation that dominates our ecosystem today.

Instead, we're engaged in a war over "pork bellies." We're publicly complaining, on stages and in pages, about commoditization. We talk incessantly about "remnant inventory."

I've got to tell you, every time I hear an interactive publishing executive use the term "remnant," I want to take a scissors, shred the dress, and stab the salesman. How dare you, I think, deprecate your property in that way? You're trying to sell couture at Bergdorf's, yet you're using the language of Seventh Avenue garmentos to describe it?

With all due respect to the IAB's members -- who are, after all, my bosses -- and to the media agencies (who are among our most important customers), I'd like to suggest that our seller-buyer-driven culture is devaluing not just the pricing but the potency of our medium. We must stop acting as if we're selling schmattes, and start acting like the makers of magic that the best of us are -- and always have been.

As I've written and any economist would affirm, supply-demand disequilibrium, exacerbated by a recession-driven flight of marketing budgets from above-the-line functions to promotional availabilities, is the root cause of today's pricing pressures in media. Yes, it's bad, and yes, it will get worse before it gets better. But it's no reason for discussions of commoditization to dominate our business -- now, or at any time. Remnants may clothe you when you are needy, but they will not make you feel grand.

Interactive Advertising Grows

And that, fundamentally, is the business we are in -- of providing men and women the information they need and they entertainment they want to think and feel and act in different and better ways. And therein lies the power of our medium, its unprecedented power, for it allows people to find the information, to talk back to the news, to create and share the entertainment, to shape the event. And that is the force of advertising in this medium -- not the fact that in some places, at some times, it can be purchased in the bargain basement.

That is the reason why, while other media platforms contract, interactive advertising is still growing: especially during a recession, not all time and space are created equal.

That's especially true within our industry. Some interactive publishing companies are growing bigger and better than others. There are many reasons for their relative success: the addition of sophisticated yield management capabilities, the creation of customer-facing services businesses, the development of consumer insights capabilities, the training of a more consultative sales force, the highlighting and fulfilling of creative opportunities for clients, the implementation of sophisticated market- and product-segmentation strategies, the undeniable attractiveness of quality content to men and women hungering for information and entertainment.

But these publishers' achievements and their bright prospects all derive from their willingness to ask -- and answer with actions -- one fundamental question: How do I add value to my consumers' experiences and my customers' businesses?

In our obsession with immediacy and accountability, we have overlooked the more subtle yet more powerful ways that companies, brands, and fortunes are built through time. Our IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Ecosystem 2.0, themed "Brands Battle Back," will launch this needed conversation.

For digital publishers and agencies, here's what I hope this conversation leads you to do:

1. Motivate greatness among your best creative people, for their work inspires consumers and customers alike.
2. Collaborate -- creative agencies and publishers -- with each other and within yourselves to develop outstanding advertising and communications products.
3. Assemble writers, designers, and technologists into teams that can engage the intellect and emotions of audiences and individuals across all channels, toward the goal of creating enduring brands.
4. Prove to your customers that causing the heart to beat quick is at least as important as making the mouse click.

Finally, and politely, let's ask the sellers and the planners, the publishers and the senior buyers, to continue their price negotiations -- but quietly, in the back room, away from the customers crowding our front counters and our home pages.

Let's return to a time when advertising and media conversation was owned by the creatives, the editors, and the impresarios -- when it was dominated by debates about the craft of persuasion, about what moves people. After all, isn't that the reason we're in this business?