A company called Toluna, however, is making it easier to fulfill on surveys.  As I explain in this AdAge column, it took me only a couple minutes to design a survey and then deploy it.  When I finished my survey (which was about Hot Sauce and why people buy it, by the way), Toluna’s Quicksurveys asked me if I wanted to fulfill by using a list of my Facebook and Twitter friends (free) or get 50 respondents from its panel for a mere $39.  No social spammer myself, I decided to go with the paid option.  That was at around 5 PM.  By 7:30 AM the next day, the survey was fielded and I had 50 respondents providing data I could monkey with.

I really like the notion of how simple Toluna makes this.  You know how easily your survey can get the target number of respondents, and you know exactly how much that will cost up front.  This is a way better approach than buying e-mail lists and praying that enough people on the list are both a) qualified and b) interested in responding.

This makes quick confirmations or refutations of assumptions a cinch.  Quicksurveys can also play a role in doing last-minute disaster checks on ads, confirming a target audience or fulfilling on any other nagging marketing unknown you’d like to get a finer gauge on.  While it won’t take the place of expensive online research just yet, I think it makes deploying quick research efforts very easy.  Maybe it makes sense to show your new digital ads to a group of 100 or so a few days before it goes live, or test that tagline with a small group before the rest of the world sees it.  Given how quick and cost-effective Quicksurveys can be, I don’t see why not.

In-store is a place where digital solutions are helping speed along innovation.  I’m not just talking about digital displays and such.  The digital mindset is helping innovation along when it comes to data-driven programs, too.  And let’s not forget about beefing up brand presence on the digital shelf, either.  We’ve seen evidence that such programs boost sales not only in the digital realm, but also on the physical shelf.

Ad Exchanges have their place in today’s advertising landscape, but its proponents often don’t see the forest for the trees.  There are serious issues with both the technology and the business dynamic that enable this type of media buying, as it exists today.  Among them:

1. An overtaxing of our ad delivery infrastructure.  You can see this in action when the page you’re trying to load in your web browser hangs while waiting for an ad exchange to figure out which advertiser should get the ad view.
2. Questions concerning how third-party data companies both get their data and marry it to cookies representing individual users.
3. Concerns about end-user privacy.
4. A business dynamic that puts content creators in a precarious position, as the automated marketplace places immense downward price pressure on content.

The folks at Digiday were kind enough to invite me to share some of my views on this marketplace, some of which were entirely at odds with other panelists’ views (which made for an exciting panel discussion).  Shawn Riegsecker of Centro did a fantastic job moderating.

Technology can help, but there’s no substitute for an experienced agency that knows where the bad neighborhoods are and where technology falls short.

We found lots of trusted brands running in really dark, disgusting corners of the web.  I doubt their buying agencies knew where the ads were running.  What’s to blame?

Part of the blame belongs with a digital media buying culture that has learned to celebrate the notion of using technology to hand-pick targeted individuals across the web, regardless of content or context.  This has led to a de-emphasis on editorial environment that is harming the industry in more ways than one.  One symptom is seeing ads for trusted brands in places no one would expect.

Another part of the blame belongs with the increased emphasis on media buying automation.  When technology ignores qualitative measures and overemphasizes quantitative ones, it leads to automated systems that make mistakes.  Sometimes big ones.

Perspective leads to precision.  It’s one of the things we pride ourselves on here at Underscore – knowing when to rely on technology and when human intervention is needed.  And the truth of the matter is that brand safety technology still has some gaping holes that need to be plugged.  We look forward to working with the various players in the industry to plug them, but we need to be realistic about what can be executed today with tools in their current state.  Yes, you do still need an agency staffed with real human beings to keep your brand out of trouble online.

Whenever a new advertising-supported digital channel emerges, one of its first problems is scale.  That is, getting enough ads in front of enough eyeballs for an ad opportunity to become interesting to a mass-market advertiser.  Th tendency is to cut corners in the quest for scale.  We’ve seen it in mobile, as app developers hastily retrofit banner ad deployment mechanisms into their utility apps, resulting in a lame “free” version that saturated the user experience with ads for debt counseling and work from home scams.  We’ve seen it in digital video, with ad networks running out of quality pre-roll ad inventory and trying to pass off in-banner inventory as an equivalent experience.

Now we’re seeing it in advergaming.  Developers used to work very hard to make advertising a seamless part of video games – something that would enhance gameplay rather than distract from it.  Now, we’re not so sure the objectives of some developers are so pure.  Games that want to serve advertising seem to want to promote themselves to players’ networks of Facebook friends more than they want to deliver an interesting gaming experience.  (More eyeballs, more ad dollars.)  It sometimes makes you wonder if the game you’re playing is really a game or some sort of viral ad engine.  Speaking of viral, I’ve also noticed that certain advergames are aiming to be more addictive than entertaining.  (More “stickiness,” more appeal to advertisers.)

Once gamers have to ask themselves whether they’re playing games or merely participating in some sort of aggressively viral promotional platform, it makes me wonder whether too many corners have been cut.  And if you underwrite gaming or advertise within video games, you need to lean on your agency to make sure that what you’re underwriting represents a worthwhile gaming experience, rather than just a self-replicating ad engine.

That’s what I keep wondering whenever I see products debut that try to turn passive television viewing into an active, lean-forward experience.  Sure, we’ve seen plenty of success when it comes to interactive content on televisions, like console gaming and such.  But I think things are doomed to failure when they try to blend lean-forward experiences with lean-back ones.  That’s why I’m not too crazy about the latest round of television manufacturer “innovation,” which places apps on televisions so that people can cruise Facebook and update their Twitter status.  People have their computers and mobile devices to take care of such things, and neither of those devices require logging in through a cumbersome input process.  Nor do they require someone’s Twitter stream to be live in front of the whole family.

Still, there are a few that disagree with me.  Check out this piece on iMedia, and join the debate.

Speaking of iMedia, this will, unfortunately, be my last column.  It’s been a great run and I wish the iMedia folks well.  I’ve been offered a regular gig with Advertising Age and – just recently – a blogging gig with The Huffington Post.  We’ll be cross-posting that stuff here, so stay tuned for more articles.

But what happens if multiple networks pitch your site to an agency?  Can you say “downward price pressure?”

That’s the subject of this week’s piece in iMedia.  Agencies see the same site represented on network proposals and it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that if one network quotes the same inventory for a lower price, it makes negotiation all that much easier.  Maybe casting inventory across a dozen networks, rep firms and exchanges isn’t the best way to go.

We’re literally swimming in data, and predictive models for what digital media bring to the table from a R/F/GRP standpoint still rely on random duplication.  It’s the predictive information that advertisers tend to use when looking at scenarios for potential levels of investment.  See where the problem is?  You can’t measure the campaign actual unless you’re able to justify the campaign in the first place.

We have solid, working predictive tools if the advertiser can get past random duplication.  But I think we can do better.

If the Internet lands somewhere on the non-neutral side of the equation after all is said and done, there are some rather unpleasant situations that could arise.  A non-neutral Internet involves some level of telecom interference with respect to Internet traffic.  Depending on how things shake out, the telecoms could – for example – decide that Internet sites and services that pay them a fee could have their traffic prioritized at a higher level.  How might this play out?  Say you’re a fan of Google search, but Microsoft decides to pay carriage fees to telecoms in order to gain a speedy advantage over Google.  Now, you may like Google over Bing, but what if Google searches took four times as long to deliver results?  You might switch to Bing for convenience’s sake.  What a shame that would be – using a non-preferred product because it gave more money to the telecoms.

Eventually, we might see an Internet where the telecoms are the king-makers, granting preference to those sites that they own or that can fork over the most fees.  We might also see things like tiered pricing to the end consumer, where you pick a site package much like you pick a cable package.  In a highly fragmented media landscape, you can see how this favors the established, stable properties and selects against newcomers or challengers.

That last part is the scariest part to me, the notion that innovation could be stifled.  If the creator of the Next Big Thing knows there are a bunch of telecom giants, each ready to extract a carriage fee at the first sign of traction in the marketplace, what does that do to innovation?  It’s this innovation that drives our business – the notion that somebody like Google could come along and re-invent the search business in a way that serves the end user in a way that AltaVista, Lycos and Hotbot never imagined, or that somebody could invent a social network that lights up the Internet and suddenly becomes the top site in terms of time investment across the Internet.  Without this wild, game-changing innovation, the Internet is a less exciting place that comes up with fewer compelling opportunities for brand marketers.

Not to mention that as a consumer, it becomes a less-compelling place to be.  I have my concerns about what the Internet looks like in the future after, say, 5 years of telecom control.  Do consumers continue to flock to the Internet if they have to think about all the different ways their ISP will charge them for doing the things they want to do online?  I doubt it.

We need to push for a neutral Internet if we want to keep the innovation coming.

This feature currently impacts only users who visit Google.com and does not apply to searches performed anywhere else and can be turned off by users. Both organic results and paid results will appear as before, however real estate below the search toolbar will be shifted depending on the number of ‘suggested searches’ that are displayed, impacting performance within the organic listings.

While sponsored links are still appearing, how impressions are being counted is changing. Previously an impression was only calculated when a user typed in a query and hit the ‘search’ button. With the launch of Google Instant, an impression is also calculated when the user stops typing and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds or when someone clicks anywhere on the page. This adjustment could potentially inflate impression volume, impacting click-through-rate and ultimately quality score. All client campaigns and categories are being watched closely to gauge the impact on Quality Score and other critical campaign variables.