I can't say enough about MIMA and if you're not a member, you should join.

That being said...tonight's "WHERE'S THE PARTY? WHAT'S HOT IN ONLINE MEDIA" was the most horrifying panel I've ever seen live. It was a six hour long discussion on banner ads.

Joe Germsheild of Fallon had several moments where he nearly saved the conversation but was far too gracious, towards his suited-zombie-table-mate from MRM, to win the day. "Zombie" may be the pot calling the kettle black as it was the audience members who were groaning and swaying in agony.

You think the Zombie thing is an analogy, I wish it was. Zombies are a thing of Voodoo; a close cousin to the formulas that bad media planners use to justify their positions. It's a dogmatic witchcraft pseudo-science world filled with charts and numbers that are read in different ways from year to year based on trends. Take metrics from any site and run analysis on it every eight months and you're going to get completely different results with the same numbers.

This is either part of human learning process or magic. Good media people are scientific in the search for some sort of truths that they can apply to their client's needs. Bad ones are island living chicken-bone and teeth over open-flame zealots who think that purchasable media and strategy and campaigns are all the same thing.

The former use the number to better educate everyone while the latter covet the numbers as justification for the existence of everything as without quantifiable ROI their world (and jobs?) would cease to exist. There is a selfish self-preservation that ends up eating the brains out of a project...what undead creature does that sound like?

In traditional advertising the media dept was often the last in line and this served a fine purpose for good creative. However, in interactive, play-it-safe media has often risen to rule the roost, which means that creative is often literally thinking inside a box. 728 pixels wide by 90 pixels tall.