Congrats Darren. I read the piece online last night. I’m really interesting with your take on media optimization and feel strongly about leveraging the data that online gives us access too. In fact, I think many of these same optimization principles should be applied to television, since so much data lives in the set-top box – yet goes unused.

I know most of your work is on the buyer side, but I have some ideas about the publishers. I feel they need to create a competitive market to push marketers to be more creative, develop an incentive system that puts users in more control of the ads they see and forces advertisers to develop better creative and useful ads – way above and beyond banners.

Further, I’m not sure how much study you do on the drivers of traffic patterns and timing of ad placement. Most online inventory is sold on a simple rotational basis, however traffic patterns don’t follow that. Publishers get traffic spikes from events or time of day or for another external reason. This lends itself somewhat to the traditional model of buying time at different prices depending on the value of the content and time – i.e. prime time television. I think it would be an interesting adventure to look into an application of this nature – either from the publisher or ad buyer perspective. I know its off topic a bit, but reading about your company got my mind going this morning. What do you think?

Darren – congrats on the piece. Nice profile and publicity. I have a portfolio company, DataXu, in stealth mode right now but will want to connect you with them at some point soon. Keep up the great work!

Darren, great to see you and all of your talents in the middle of these important trends.

That’s so cool! Congrats!

The Wall Street analogy is certainly evocative, and begs the question whether online media will some day be bought and sold in the same manner that stocks, options, commodities, currencies and futures today are traded today.

Of course, some fundamental differences exist between online ad impressions and financial assets, and this suggests that the online ad markets could and should evolve differently.

Ad impressions aren’t similar to commodities like oil. There’s no way to park and store ad impressions the way you can warehouse barrels of oil, something that oil traders have been doing by buying tankers to warehouse oil bought at the cheaper spot market rate and sold forward at higher rates for future delivery (the contango trade).

Congratulations Darren and John on the great coverage – and I look forward to seeing how you guys will continue to evolve this market.

I get some seriously crunched eyebrow stares from creative associates, but I like the dive into the thick of it — the analytic rigor that the better the metrics the better the creative (and the better For creatives). It can be the key, not the lock, to greater creative involvement in ROI conversations. Seems to me there’s a 24/7 role that ROI — and “Media Optimization”– at play in our every decision — not just in what to buy, but what to “buy into” — who to love, when to commit, when to revolt, where and how to leap and risk….Bring it on Darren; the more enlightened the conversation — especially in the 3rd dimension of audience — the more likely creative lightening will strike in the right place at the right time, sparking, not killing, the ideas that move people.