It is very true that marketers, agencies, and media must adapt to a world in which classic formatted advertising will be more fragmented, and gradually will be complemented, and perhaps even supplanted by other forms of marketing communications and marketing services. IAB has done and continues to do a lot of work in this area, notably our 2007-2008 “Marketing-Media Ecosystem 2010″ research by Booz & Co., and our recent “Building Brands Online” study done in conjunction with Bain (both available on our Web site).

But the fact is, the overwhelming bulk of brand advertising still takes the form of “mass, interruptive” display – whether that display is in print, television, outdoor, or online. Brand marketers, especially in CPG and other low-consideration categories that make up perhaps 60% or more of all above-the-line advertising expenditures in the US, depend on these forms of scalable advertising to get their messages in front of a consumer population that’s in-market all the time for their products. This was underscored by something the ~700 marketers responding to the IAB/Bain survey told us: They overwhelmingly prefer such metrics as awareness, recall, intent to purchase and likeability – “traditional” metrics they say correlate more closely to their need to drive continuous sales at brand-premium prices than do Web-centric metrics such as clickthroughs and pageviews. For brand advertisers, seamless scale is still the way to go.

So anything that adds complexity and cost to the delivery of this type of scalable advertising will impede that medium’s growth, purely and simply. All of us in the interactive industry have heard this complexity and cost disadvantage raised time and again as a primary reason – perhaps THE primary reason – that interactive’s share of brand marketers’ budgets remains at roughly 7%, while consumer time spent with interactive media is as much as 30%.

My point was and is: While the new device-based applications of Internet Protocol certainly contribute to consumer delight, to the degree they fragment the interactive advertising supply chain and contribute to continuing cost and complexity, they will hinder both the amount of scalable brand advertising that flows to the medium generally, and certainly add fulfillment cost to virtually any individual segment or player. Already, the cost of adapting rich media campaigns to different sites is impeding growth and adding cost to agencies and publishers alike.

As a result, it’s very important that the industry work together with agencies and marketers to assure as much seamless scale across devices as possible. And at the same time, all players need to redouble their efforts to create new products and services that can fulfill marketers’ needs.

Or to shorthand this into a sentence: If the supply chain doesn’t work, the stuff doesn’t get from Point A to Point B, and people don’t get paid.

Hope this helps! Keep writing!