When I started put all those together as digital, the numbers behind it all started to matter- analytics. When I looked across the board in communications I saw the numbers outside of the web- TV, print, direct mail.

Now, I see all those things as communicating with technology. Everything falls into communicating with digital. Convergence.

It shouldn’t surprise me. I purchase Facebook ads, Google adwords and Yahoo BT banner ads on a regular basis. I know the targeting options and how to maximize clickthroughs to a custom landing page, but I am still surprise by how the ads were useful to me.

It reminds me how my grandmother used to read my hometown newspaper– First she looks through all the sales and any other shopping interests and then she would go back through the stories. She actually found the ads worth reading rather than something that got in the way of the information she was seeking.

It’s amazing how Internet advertising is coming back full circle where the ads are actually useful and make money just like the small-town newspaper. Unfortunately, this fledging form of useful advertising is now under attack with the Commerce Department proposing a new online privacy bill of rights for Internet users and the Federal Trade Commission proposing Do Not Track legislation.

Privacy online and Internet advertising has always been sort of trade off for me. I give up some information about me in return I receive something I want (information, news) from a web site with no direct out of pocket costs. The web site uses that information to target ads to me creating a better web experience and more value for their advertising.

Make entertaining stuff, give it to people where they already are, let them have fun with it, and mix in brand messaging. And because of the viral nature of the Web, each new consumer is cheaper to win than the last one.

Yes, Ashton really does get it. He continues:

Katalyst (his company) is a merger of three industries. A piece of us is connected to ad agencies. Because we get the complex overlay of the social Web, we know how to engage an audience and how to make entertainment for the social Web. And we know how to gain and activate and retain an audience. So we create social networks for brands.

“For years the ad business has been happy to have a completely ambiguous accounting system they’ve been monetizing off of. Now that the web offers a slightly more granular dollars-and-cents audience-acquisition metric – now they’re going to get completely granular about how they’re getting money?”

I shouldn’t be surprised that Ashton can intelligently discuss this, but I have to say that he apparently really does get it.

The commission also examined issued the media is facing recommending:

• Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.
• Increase the role of higher education,community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.

The Guardian has an interesting look at this debate  pitting the NY Times Maureen Dowd against Jeff Jarvis examining whether Google is friend or foe.

Dowd says Google has hijacked journalism.  “Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy. Robert Thomson, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like Google as “tapeworms”.”

Jarvis on the other hand has faced the facts. “I had been naively thinking – hoping – that there would be an orderly transfer of power, print to digital, and that many of the incumbents would survive and some might lead the transition. With some exceptions, I no longer believe that.”

But besides what I think, there’s a lot of buzz around . Here’s a couple of analysis of Brill’s model that makes sense to me.

• John Temple
• Ken Doctor

Thanks to Jack Lail for pointing out this video.