Question: When does an adolescent industry become adult and established? Answer: When its users are surprised when they see an error. Just look at the buzz created when TV or print makes a mistake. Consumers are conditioned by high levels of past performance to think that their media is above error. What would happen if you find a newspaper full of stains or that was badly written? What if your landline phone made noises interrupting your communications? Would you keep paying for a car that keeps on breaking down? I guess not. The same happens with our medium. …

We in the Internet advertising business are fond of cookies. We need them. We want to keep them. We use them all the time. But we are, undoubtedly, an interested party. Cookie critics, meanwhile, claim that they are just plain bad, while the personal privacy and security software vendors give users the impression that they are the same in quality or intent as the spyware that infests a computer with pop-ups, or the dialer downloads that secretly call a number in Uzbekistan for $5 a minute. But are they really instruments of the devil? Should cookie servers really be tarred …

Content is king, but not for long. Like most stories of overthrown monarchies, this too will be an inside job. This tale includes a publishing army, well-dressed evil empires, and treason committed by the King's own flesh and blood. King Content's soldiers had odd yet powerful names like ESPN and Fox, GQ and OK, NYT and WSJ, CBS and NBC, KFOG and KROCK. These acronymic warriors were meant to serve and honor the throne by publishing an engaging product designed to please the people the King was meant to serve.

At Chicago's Ad:Tech conference, it was reported that marketers indicated a deep ambivalence towards blogs, saying that their companies urgently want a blog presence but, at the same time, fear the consequences of letting consumers freely express their opinions. This is not an unreasonable reaction. What right-thinking company wants their message running on a Web site where they can't know with certainty that the content won't be offensive or may even attack the advertiser's own brand?

In this new age of advertising accountability, ad agencies are in a difficult spot. They have reams of data showing how various traditional and offline media perform for advertisers. And so, with some degree of accuracy media buyers can predict how a campaign will perform (though they acknowledge that the quality of the creative can have a profound and unknowable impact on the performance). Meanwhile, the action is heating up online where advertisers get a more precise, more immediate measure of how their ads perform--and with paid-search ads, they only pay when the ads perform. Media consumption is falling …