iMedia's media strategies editor offers the three truths of advertising that he finds are the most fundamental and yet the most often overlooked.

In my more than a dozen years of working in advertising, I've been fortunate to have worked at different places, planned for different clients from different categories and used and analyzed all kinds of media, from blimps to Super Bowl spots.

But there are three primary truths about advertising that have been revealed to me again and again over the years that I find are the most fundamental and yet the most often overlooked.

I've spoken at conferences or in meetings with clients over the years about these truths, but I never spoke of them as truths, per se. I instead mentioned three books that everyone working in advertising and marketing should absolutely, positively read in order to do their jobs better and understand better what advertising and marketing is supposed to accomplish.

I should be saving these nuggets for as long as I can, trotting them out in every new meeting. But I'm going to share them with you all because if there is any chance of them having a positive impact on the industry, all of our working lives will be better and more productive.

1. Advertising and marketing is for selling
This is probably the first, last and most important truth about advertising. It is also quite often the most frequently forgotten fundamental truth of advertising. With television's final and conclusive seizure in the 80s of the preeminent medium for advertising, media planning became more of an exercise in how best to feature creative rather than persuasive message transmission for the sake of moving a client's business. More often than we'd like (or admit to), agencies use the work they do for their clients as a means for featuring themselves. There are plenty of marketers and advertisers who will tell you that their objectives might be branding, or promotions or building a database. But these are all just different roads, each of which leads to Damascus. And Damascus is the sale of product or service. No matter how much we fancy ourselves as artists, scientists or intellectuals, we are ultimately the facilitators of our clients' business of moving product and service. We can still be artists, scientists and intellectuals; but it is in the service of our clients' objectives.

David Ogilvy wrote THE book on advertising that I always, always recommend. "Ogilvy On Advertising" is still the quintessential text on the subject. When one of the founding grandfathers of the industry, and a creative guy at that, tells you that advertising should be to sell product, we should listen. The subject of the second chapter (which starts the third page into the book) is on how to produce advertising that sells.

2. Markets are conversations
The industry talks a lot about this these days, and it's good that we do so.  But most advertisers are still afraid to engage in a conversation. They want to tell their audiences what to do, but they don't seem willing to surrender enough control to persuade them to do it.

It's important to remember that the modern media landscape is a public space. As David Weinberger says in his section of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," having a voice doesn't mean being able to sing in the shower. It means presenting oneself to others. To preserve the integrity of the internet as a vast public square that enables self-expression without suffering the indignities of the untruths that are found there, advertisers need to take a level assessment of the expression and its potential implications.

Everyone should read the "ClueTrain Manifesto," by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. It's not the best business book ever written, but one of the book's central ideas is that a marketplace needs to be an open, honest conversation, both good and bad. Warts and all exposure is a much better approach than to recluse behind the curtain shouting: "I am the great and powerful Oz!"

3. Caution, young padawan
Technology has always played some role in advertising. More often than not, advertising has been more of a follower than a leader when it comes to advertising. But with online, technology is the phalanx in front of just about everything we do with advertising. We highlight keywords for clickthrough to coupons, we pop-up or pop-under, we sniff your clickstream and show you ads, we download video to your PSP while you are traveling in a van with your buddies. If it can be done, we'll do it. 

But that's not always the right thing to do. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do something just because you can, just embrace the fact that what you are doing doesn't have to bear the results you are hoping for or expect. But sometimes a thing's facility is not enough of a reason to engage it. In online, more than any other medium, marketers and advertisers are prone to irrationally exuberant trial. The millions spent against Second Life come to mind as a perfect example of this truth: just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

This truth is no better laid out for all to comprehend than it is in Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein." Sometimes our capacity for mechanism exceeds our ability to use it.

Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International Inc., an Omnicom company. Read full bio.