Advances in making online advertising a potentially more profitable enterprise will be found in both standardization and in clients taking the process more seriously.

It's no secret that time is NOT on our side when it comes to the conduct of business in the marketing arena. If your focus is the planning, producing and placing of online media, you are particularly aware of the scarcity of time at your disposal to accomplish these tasks.

The reasons for this are two-fold: The need and desire for online marketing and media is growing faster than those needs and desires can be accommodated, and the amount of time clients are allowing for them to be met is desperately short.

Clients want the biggest, baddest and best online media plan, and they want it yesterday. The problem with wanting the best yesterday is that yesterday is already gone. So you are going to end up with, at best, a day-old plan with a day-before-that strategy.

Gen. George S. Patton is credited with having once said, "A good plan today is better than a great plan tomorrow." In war, this is certainly true. And there are those out there who view what we are doing as war. But the consequence of waiting a day for a great plan in war is death. The consequence of waiting a day for a great plan in business is not. In fact, that extra day might be the difference between moderate interest in a product or service under promotion (leaving product on the shelves) and an ecstatic embrace of that product or service to the degree where a company can barely keep up with demand.

First-mover advantage -- the common cause for the amount of time compression we in this business are subjected to -- isn't always necessary to attain success. If you want proof, just think of Nintendo's Wii. "Great" tomorrow paid off a lot more than "good" today.

The "I want it yesterday" approach not only affects the potential business outcome for the client demanding it, but it also leaves the agency from which it is being demanded strapped for resources and, often, operating at a loss. 

I am not being hyperbolic when I say that it is not unusual for a client to spend more time negotiating down the agency fee than the time they give the agency to develop strategy, media plans, design creative, purchase, place and run their marketing.

This leaves the agency short on resources and can too often result in marketing and advertising execution that leaves the client wanting a better return on its marketing investment. So the client is unhappy, the agency is operating at a loss (and maybe gets fired) and a lot more money is wasted in the purchase of the media than the savings from the fee negotiation.

But client pressures for a solution ASAP, and their aversion to paying for it isn't the only reason for the lack of time that is the bane of our industry.

Shelly Palmer, in his keynote address at the recent iMedia Breakthrough Summit, spoke directly to this issue when he said, "We are in the unsexy phase" of the development of online media and marketing. We are no longer deciding if a company needs a website or whether or not we like video online. It's now about things like managing workflow."

How do you make the moving parts work and work well? You can't have workflow management without some form of common currency.

A continuing lack of standardization among publishers and providers of creative units, both in terms of dimensions, file sizes and formats, is in no small part a contributing factor to the temporal and fiscal pain the industry still experiences. There are still so many different ad units on any given page that the people representing the sites themselves are often confused. Traffic coordinators contacting agencies for required specifications, last minute unit size changes due to site redesign and general inconsistencies among file loads are regular struggles for agency personnel.

Rich media, in particular, has the potential for being a bigger and bigger issue when agencies are asked to put together plans with shorter and shorter lead times. I wince at the moniker "rich media" because it should all be just "media." (Saying rich media is like saying "electro-vacuum" or putting the letter "e" in front of anything having to do with the internet.)

The term rich media signifies a technical call-out more than anything else. There is no doubt that bigger, more engaging creative is better than smaller, less engaging creative. But an ongoing lack of standardization among publishers and providers -- and quite frankly the more general use of creative that is considered rich media -- plays a significant role in eroding efficiencies on BOTH sides of the business that could otherwise be translated into profits.

When we can stop worrying about dozens of different rich media specs and creative types, agencies will be able to start yielding greater efficiency and publishers will be able to turn campaigns around faster on their end. This means everyone makes more money, agencies can yield higher margins and/or work on more projects, and publishers can clear buys faster with fewer make-goods.

The real establishment of more consistent standards alone won't dissolve the problems online shops are facing, but it will ameliorate them some. If this back-end issue can be met by addressing the problem on the front end of clients not respecting the medium, THEN we'd really have something here -- a powerful, intelligent, analytic industry no longer doing too much work in too short a period of time.

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