One broad definition of online display advertising refers to any form of advertisement that appears “graphically” on a user’s machine and that is not entirely text-based. It would encompass traditional “banner” ads and standard IAB ad units, along with various other types of rich media which includes in-video advertising, advertisements via Facebook applications, alternate graphical formats and other “emerging” interactive units.

This definition of display advertising makes up one major part of the triad that is the current online distribution ecosystem (the other two being search and email), and makes up a healthy portion of advertiser’s spend on the Web today.

Quite a few experts have questioned whether display advertising “works” or not; I would argue that we really only know if a subset works or doesn’t. I hear some say “we’re going to put more money towards search or email because display doesn’t work for us”. The follow–up question which usually yields crickets is “how are you measuring the true effectiveness of your display campaigns?”

Display advertising’s true effectiveness has always been a conversation akin to church and state. There are quite a few ways to actually measure components of display advertising. On one side, you have an impression-based effectiveness measure (we know it as CPM) which is inherently very broad with no true “performance” gauge. On the other side, you have a completely performance-based effectiveness measure (we know it as CPA) that is inherently very narrow with no true “branding” or “reach” gauge.

The question most advertisers have, and where we in the marketing industry must serve advertisers better, is rooted in the right way to measure the overall effectiveness of online advertising campaigns which yields a better value computation.

Advertisers historically have either been predisposed to performance-based or brand-based advertising. This thinking was adopted from the offline world, where you have your direct marketers (direct mailers, infomercials) who measure effectiveness mostly on sales generated; and your brand advertisers who appear on billboards in Times Square and the Sunset Strip. For the advertisers that do embrace virtues of direct marketing and brand marketing, its still likely that they are two separate lines in the marketing budget , which is symbolic of the bifurcation most make between the “ROI” focused portion of their spend and the unquantifiable, branding portion of the budget.

But what do all advertisers really want? What does everyone look to achieve in any advertising campaign? The answer is effectiveness. Whether an advertiser quantifies this through eyeballs, clicks, sales, brand association, PR, foot traffic, buzz, word of mouth, unique visits or downloads … all are measures of effectiveness. Most advertisers in the offline world likely measure at least a few of these in a vacuum depending on their specific goals for a campaign, yet don’t take into consideration all the other ancillary or long-term benefits that provide value because they are near impossible to measure and don’t fit neatly into a marketing budget.

I see this as an error in thinking in our bolder, newer, faster world which short-changes the online medium and is why I think online advertising is still so young with its very brightest days ahead of it. Proper measurement should be evaluated on a continuum with no end date, a rolling measurement of effectiveness, taking any and all factors into consideration including impressions, clicks and actions relating to a specific ad view, but also type — in traffic, viral marketing, blog coverage and a myriad of other actions that occur well beyond the ad view or click, yet can still be attributed to that ad campaign (or many campaigns). The great thing is that it’s possible, albeit more scary and difficult than just porting over the traditional offline measurement techniques and thinking, and a solution is probably closer than you think.

Many believe that there is a truly comprehensive measure yet to be fully introduced that can provide better insight into advertising campaign effectiveness and value. Some companies have made slight attempts in the past (DoubleClick’s “View Through”, Microsoft to some extent with “Engagement Mapping”), but the reality is that nothing has truly taken hold – yet. Some companies, like ours as one example, believe that we as an industry have not yet adopted a measure that comprehensively and accurately shows a campaign’s effectiveness and are committed to solving this by filing patents, employing Chief Algorithmists and PhD’s, and more.

The ultimate solution takes science, art and statistics, not to mention hard work, on the back end – which yields an easy to understand solution on the front end with a goal of true commitment and adoption by many. It’s in the best interest of advertisers and in keeping our industry vibrant and unique from other forms of media, and will better leverage its inherent potential.

Interactive advertisers can create the custom banners themselves and then deploy them on specific publisher sites in Pontiflex’s GENList publisher directory. Its patent-pending data transfer technology then delivers the lead data from publisher to advertiser.

“In this economy, we are always looking for ways we can get more bang for our buck,” says Jared Blank, CEO of Tripmela, an industry leading travel Web site focused on India. “We run a large number of online campaigns to generate qualified leads and build our newsletter in a cost-effective way. AdUnit X banners are by far the best performing of all our creative units.”

Pontiflex’s ad management platform already allowed advertisers to automate and centralize media planning, campaigns, reporting and optimization. “Now they can also create custom CPL AdUnitX banners, which have a demonstrable track record of increasing campaign ROI,” said Zephrin Lasker, CEO and Co-founder, Pontiflex. “Advertisers can now buy display advertising on a CPL basis and not just through CPM and CPC pricing models.”

In April, Pontiflex raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from venture capital firms New Atlantic Ventures and Greenhill SAVP.

Executives are watching traditional voice revenue take a nosedive and they do see mobile advertising as a way to drag them into the black as brands come up with increasingly sophisticated targeting methods, Reuters reports.

“If you look at the long horizon, I think that advertising on mobile phones is going to be very, very significant, simply because there are going to be 5 billion mobile phones and they are always with you,” Hamid Akhavan, the head of Germany’s T-Mobile, told Reuters.

Some executives fret about the “spam” aspect of mobile advertising – even as they venture into the space. “A cell phone is an intimate device,” Virgin Mobile’s chief executive Dan Schulman told the wire service. “We pay a service provider to have that service and we don’t want to be spammed, quite frankly.” Virgin is currently using AOL’s mobile ad system exclusively to send banner ads to people who use their phones to surf the Web.

So what’s the deal? Format Dynamics has developed a way to insert ads (that are actually readable! And new!) into Web page printouts with its Clean Print program. Market research firm MetaFacts estimates that readers printed more than 61 billion pages last year – and until now, that represented completely untapped ad inventory, Holien explains.

“As it stands, even with the printer-friendly format, you get a horrible, cluttered user experience when you print a page – and elements often get cut off,” Ethan Holien, Format Dynamics’ CEO told ADOTAS. “With our program, you get a magazine-like experience. Your printout includes advertisements that are appropriate for the printed page.”

But never mind the user: publishers and advertisers may be the biggest winners with the new development. The program essentially creates a new ad channel with reformatting technologies that paginate HTML content, adding an entirely new level of ad inventory for the publisher. Not only is a fresh ad (never the same as the one that appears on the users’ computer screen) printed out with the content, publishers and advertisers can position ads in different ways – on the lower-right-hand corner of the page, for example.

Clean Print will provide the most significant impact for travel publishers, news sites and sites that post highly print-worthy items like recipes, directions and tickets, Holien predicts.

“The ads are digitally served and targeted for each user, resolving a number of problems for publishers and advertisers,” Holien noted. “For years, major publishers and have been trying to optimize the blend of content and ads and really monetize ad space, without sacrificing the user experience. Printer-friendly buttons attempted to address the issue somewhat, but ads were still being cut off.”

While developing the Clean Print program (the idea was hatched about four years ago), Holien and his team realized that there were no reliable analytics available to screen printing behavior. Click-monitoring is down to a science, but publishers can only gather printing stats through their print-friendly buttons.

So Format Dynamics created Print Tracker – a browser and link-based program that measures everything users print (side note: interestingly, most people don’t use the print-friendly button to print content, Holien said.)

The company has also developed a Click for Print program. While it’s an ancillary development for Format Dynamics, “it’s a way to print banner ads and other display ads – and it’s great for coupons,” Holien explained.

Clean Print is currently live on several dozen newspapers, Rand McNally – and ADOTAS!

The site is spearheading a new ad model in which advertising sponsors will help members fulfill “their stupidest wish ever.” The concept is still in development, but it’s seen as key to the growth of the site and its parent IAC/InterActiveCorp., which plans to spin off four of its businesses so it can focus on interactive advertising and media, Reuters reports.

Banner ads no longer cut the mustard, CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen told Reuters, explaining his site’s new approach to integrating advertisements with a user’s overall experience.

“Now advertisers won’t even talk to you unless you have a great topline idea, something cool,” Van Veen told Reuters. “They use the banners and the rest of the stuff to support the deal.”

CollegeHumor is currently offering a paid summer job for a comedy writer wannabe – sponsored by Virgin Mobile.

The New York Times reported today that Pepsi-Cola North America is unveiling a new calorie-free, carbonated beverage called Tava with its own Web site (www.tava.com), banner ads, promotions and sampling events. (Tava will also be sent gratis to tech-happy employees of Google, Apple and MTV).

One of the reasons Pepsi’s approach is so revolutionary: Tava is not supposed to be the new hotness for Paris Hilton compatriots. The caffeine-free, fruit-flavored drink is being aimed squarely at the minivan brigade — the 35 to 49 demographic, The Times reports.

“There used to be an assumption this target was not online,” Frank Cooper, vice president for flavored carbonated soft drinks at Pepsi told The Times. “But there’s a group in that category that’s ‘reborn digital.’ They’ve lived through the change and learned to adapt to it. This consumer spends significant time online, although what they do may differ from the younger consumer. They’re not I.M.-ing their friends; they’re looking at e-mail or looking up information about travel, music, food.”

Tribal DDB Worldwide, the digital arm of DDB Worldwide, is handling the campaign. Banner ads will reportedly appear on AOL, chow.com, CitySearch, oprah.com, People and weather.com, among other sites.

The technology claims to improve click-through rates and brand engagement for all types of on-line advertising. The partnership program offers comprehensive training, certification, strategy consultation and preferred-partner pricing. The program will start with an aggressive performance guarantee to its agency partners – offering a 50% increase in click-through rates over a traditional banner ad campaign – or it will refund the cost of the client’s campaign.

David Sidman, founder and CEO of Linkstorm stated “Any product as revolutionary as Linkstorm can only achieve widespread adoption if it is offered as a ‘whole product’ along with the services and support that enable any party – not just the visionaries or early adopters – to realize immediate, measureable ROI. With this program – and with a bold guarantee that puts our own money where our mouth is regarding performance – we are offering all the ingredients necessary for our agency partners to deliver a major win for their clients.”

Subjects covered in the full-day session include customer segmentation and messaging; account strategy and how to embody it in a Linkstorm menu; measurement and on-the-fly optimization; best practices in designing and executing Linkstorm campaigns and ad operations and trafficking.

Managing director of UTalkMarketing.com, Niall McKinney was quoted in Broadband Finder.co.uk to say of Facebook’s Beacon program that “If it is a straightforward banner ad or other types of traditional online display adverts…then that is a very normal and straightforward thing to do – there is a big audience there and advertisers are quite right and are entitled to try and reach them.”

This raises an issue of who is entitled to what. With spyware programs widely available, users can avoid behavior tracking which is what advertisers use to target them. And the wheel continues to perpetuate around and around and around.

This summer, YouTube and CNN hosted two debates for Democratic and Republican candidates with questions coming from voters submitting questions online. MTV and MySpace have teamed up to bring a series of Q&A sessions with various candidates and college students as well as online questions submitted via IM. Democratic hopeful, John Edwards has done a campaign through Pingercast, leaving voicemail campaign messages on the mobile phones of opt-in Pinger users. These tactics have proven to generate positive responses for the participating candidates.

However, not all of channels online are flawless. To say they are would be a gross overstatement. But when Mitt Romney decided to have some of his budget go to online advertisements for his campaign, his camp never realized the ad serving system that they have used, that randomly places ads across its network of sites would place ads for Romney on Gay.com.

This is a problem only in that Romney and the gay community don’t exactly have the rosiest of histories together, according to The New York Times. Banner ads for Romney ran for at least two day in August, showing at an estimated minimum of 32,000 times according to tracking done by AdRelevance, Nielsen Online’s monitoring service.

Romney has been a vocal in his opposition of same-sex marriages and has used this view to attract the support of religious conservatives. This is not the only incident where the placement of a candidate’s ads has been in questionable considering the content they surround.

Mindy Finn, director of Romney’s online strategy was quoted in the New York Times to say “Campaigns have been buying advertising on television for 40-plus years now; they’ve only been buying ads on the Internet for three or four years. It’s more unchartered territory, and everyone’s trying to figure it out.”

Romney also had ads of his run on FanFiction.net, the report continued, which allows users to write their own plots about their favorite fictional characters, or read the writings of other users, including what has been described to be a collection of pornographic scenes between Hermione Granger and Harry Potter.

Barack Obama had an advertisement of his removed from an Amazon.com screen that was dedicated to the book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” This had produced an outcry from Jewish groups, claiming this was anti-Semitic.

John McCain had ads running on the Huffington Post site, and Rudolph Giuliani had ads show up on a liberal blog called DailyKos.

Regardless of the occasional blip, online advertising provides unprecedented exposure for candidates as they lobby for the position of ruler of the free world; Finn stated “We have learned. It provides a danger, but there is also incredible opportunity.”

SafeServe offers the benefits of third-party ad serving without the use of third-party cookies, therefore downsizing the concerns over consumer privacy. TruAdvertiser.xls is the first enterprise ad serving platform completely integrated with Microsoft Excel. This helps lower the cost of planning, buying, trafficking, delivering and the measuring of banner and rich media advertising.

“Interactive advertising has undergone explosive growth in the recent years but the  traditional solutions advertisers use have not evolved to meet the growing needs and concern of the industry,” said TruEffect president and CEO, Ron Hill. “TruEffect has changed the traditional approach to interactive advertising through patent-pending capabilities that allow interactive advertisers the choice to serve without using a cookie, thus taking an unambiguous stance with the consumer.”