By this, do you mean that the ability to track and report on campaigns online is not as good compared to TV? Am I missing something?

What we have here is a lack of quality inventory online and too much fear/lack of understanding/laziness by the media buyers who are spending the cash.

As I mentioned in

TV’s power takes another beating, the only thing saving TV is the fact that there isn’t enough targeted inventory available online. Folks like FeedBurner, Adify, FM Publishing, 9Rules, and other emerging (mostly sell-side) networks out there in the blogosphere must be very happy.

Paw: “Agencies and their clients are sheep - if enough trade press articles trumpet the new media as the place to be, they will be there, regardless of lack of standards by which to measure success.”

Clients like to see hard data before they commit to, or even continue, any media spending. It’s not just “Cool, let’s do it.”

I’ll bet my money on Wall Street’s assessment of success.

Paw, perhaps looking at Google vs the NYT’s stock price and revenues over the past three years is the best affirmation that the paradigm has shifted.

CBS’s news audience at this point is probably pretty much in nursing homes. I haven’t seen Time or Newsweek for years outside of a dentist office. Scandals and insipid or blatantly agenda driven news reporting is turning off readers and viewers. FOX is the only stellar revenue and audience performer. The hacks in the larger lefty pc MSM would rather fall on their swords, stick with their drivel, and lose revenues than remake their product into something with more depth and balance.

McKinsey continues to fleece corporate America with their repackaged mumbo jumbo that, heck, any teen could’ve told ‘em two years ago. All they gotta do is… blog.

Malcolm Gladwell made this case in one of his best New Yorker pieces, “The Talent Myth”:

http://malcolmgladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

Good luck trying to get the online community to agree on a uniform standard for measurement, affidavit of performance and reliable data on ROI. Right now, there’s no business incentive to do so - the money’s coming their way without any of that, so why spend the money?

Agencies and their clients are sheep - if enough trade press articles trumpet the new media as the place to be, they will be there, regardless of lack of standards by which to measure success.

Good points, but in reality the metrics of advertising are not ironclad now. Most of the efforts are swags with lipstick on them. When the herd changes direction and the followers in the advertising industry decide to go online then the sea change will occur.

Also, the senior partners of the advertising and Fortune 100 are not of the internet generation, so when online is pitched to them, they have a hard time seeing the potential. It is easy to throw a few dollar at online marketing, but to make it a focus of the campaign takes a new breed of business managers and advertisers.

One thing that might help would be the establishment of personal IP numbers. Everybody would get one. Each number would be unique, with the level of personal information revealed set by the user. The basic information would be, “Yes, this is a human being.” or, “No, this is not a human being.”

A person’s IP number would go with the person from ISP to ISP, Internet service to Internet service. Spoofing or faking IP numbers would bear a substantial penalty.

The problem is implementing this scheme. If adopted it would likely take a while.

The alternative is for the ad agency to go with gut instinct. If it looks like a good place to advertise your client’s goods, then see if they’ll take advertising.