I have been noticing an increasing amount of chatter on blogs and forums about the current state of internet display advertising. True, companies like Right Media are making so-called “remnant display inventory” widely available like never before. But, what is this inventory? Is it lower quality than “non-remnant display inventory”?

Guess what, in most cases it is the same exact inventory.

Remnant inventory gets its name because it is leftover—- after the primary salesforce associated with the property gets its shot. Think of Forbes.com. Forbes has its own sales team selling insertion orders representing impressions on certain pages. When they sell everything that they can sell, at the highest CPM they can get, the rest gets peddled as “remnant”. Does this make it any worse? No. Does it make it any cheaper. Yes.

So, now we have the situation where remnant display inventory is becoming widely available to SMEs for what is really the first time. Should most small businesses start buying it up?

NO.

Here is the reason why most businesses and agencies are not prepared to effectively purchase display inventory, albeit cheap impressions, as part of their marketing campaigns: most of these marketers are ill-equipped to understand the effect this advertising might have on the other elements of their campaign.

Are display impressions likely to lead to clicks? Sometimes. Are those clicks likely to convert? Almost never. In fact, higher click through rates on display advertising are often not accompanied by corresponding conversion rates. Are they still valuable? Yes, absolutely.

Display impressions are for one thing, and one thing only: building brand affinity. The return for the investment made into establishing brand affinity is almost never recognized on the branding campaign itself, but on other tactics concurrently or subsequentially employed. The effects might take time to be felt. But, at the end of the day a successful display campaign will result in lower CPCs on PPC campaigns, higher conversion rates from SEO pages, and the like.

Understanding this relationship, measuring it, and optimizing to enhance it are difficult and over the heads of most marketers. So, should you dabble in display? Sure. Will it work for you? Probably not. Will you know whether it worked or not? Unfortunately, no.

This is something that, even at this point when the tools are becoming readily available to the masses, is probably best left to the professionals. But, one thing is sure, small to medium sized businesses have a ton to gain by this trend of making their marketing miniature versions of the big dogs’ marketing, using all the same types of tactics.

Let it be known, I tend to stick up for the small guy.  In the recent Superbowl, I rooted for the Cardinals (even though I didn’t think they either deserved it or had any real chance of winning.  I prefer “somewhat local” to “mega global” any day of the week.

Also let it be known, I tend to be willing to pay premium prices for superior products.  I am no cheapskate, I know that the old adage “you get what you pay for” is more often true than not.  Heck, I spent a few years in the high-end stereo business, so I even understand and accept theories of “diminishing return”.

So, when I choose a service provider because they are the underdog, even when their product is not competitively priced, I expect quality in return.  Unfortunately, Hostway thinks it is okay to charge more and deliver inferior service.  This combination not only leaves me with no other choice than to discontinue my service with them, it leaves me mad enough to blog about it.  Take that, Hostway.

What made me so mad?  Years ago, I signed up for hosting with them and registered the domain name through them.  Sure, the price was high.  But, at the time I was doing a lot of work with Hostway (marketing for their clients, etc), and thought the premium guys would be worth it.  Truth be told, my experience has been pretty good for a number of years.  Until now.

All I want to do is transfer my domain to another host.  This has locked me in a customer support death spiral that is making me pull out my hair.  I have threatened to report them to ICANN.  No help.  I have sent them links to TUCOWS lost password page.  No help.  I have begged and pleaded for service.  Any service at all.  No help.

So, here I am.  7 days into this and no resolution.  The best I’ve gotten was a human response saying “thank you for your patience, this has been escalated to level 2 support”.  I don’t care what your support structure is, Hostway.  Your lack of service is astonishing.  It is so bad, quite frankly, that I may have to reconsider some basic principles I have yet held so dear.

Thanks a whole heck of a lot.

Google Insights (http://www.google.com/insights) is reporting that post-inauguration, Barack Obama has surpassed some pretty big names, at least in terms of search volume.

Is this a good time to do some arbitrage for my Amazon affiliate program?  My Google results are only showing two PPC ads, both positive messages and neither peddling either of his books.

Nope, this is a time for renewal (and reconciliation, according to the White House today).  Today is not a day to eek out tiny profits as an invisible middleman.  Today is a day to revel in hopefulness, pride and pray that Mr. Obama can do something to fix this wretched economy before it is too late.

Hard to believe, but it is already time to ring in another new year.  What did I learn in ‘08?  Here’s a list of some things off the top of my head, in no particular order:

• In hard times, it is good to be an expert at something
• You can teach an old dog new tricks, just don’t expect that they will be good tricks (sorry, RHD and IDAR.PK)
• Dell makes lousy laptops, but for some reason people are still buying them
• I still can’t believe there is a good reason to use Twitter
• There still may be a future for mobile search, but it probably won’t rely on the .mobi TLD
• Warm>Cold
• Never, ever be a long-term contractor instead of a fulltime employee (sorry, Google)
• Never stray far from what you are really good at (sorry, Yahoo)
• Never try to compete at something you don’t understand (sorry, Microsoft)
• Monetize, monetize, monetize.  There’s only value if you can monetize
• At least blogging is cathartic, since nobody actually reads what most people write (sorry, me)
• A moderately funny cat video can generate more traffic than all the SEO in the world
• I may never get a bag of crap from Woot, but that doesn’t stop me from trying