Ecommerce has grown every year since the advent of the commercial web. A month or two before Thanksgiving, the internet-ocracy opines that this year -- whichever year it happens to be -- will be the biggest year for ecommerce. And every year, this has been so. This year is no different.

Forrester Research just released a report called "US Online Holiday Sales Bring Good Tidings to Retailers." The report states, among other things, that online holiday sales will increase 25 percent to $18 billion this holiday season, despite falling consumer confidence and higher gas prices.

The holidays are a time when media companies and the brands doing business with them all try to take advantage of the timbre of mood of the season.

But what if your online media campaign had been planned months, or even a year, ago (yes, wouldn't that be nice!)? How do you make sure that changes to the layout or the content of a site do not adversely affect the media placements you've committed to?

Ho-ho-holiday campaign

If the online media campaign you are planning has a holiday focus, then chances are that during the planning process you will know what kinds of changes are going to be made, if any, to the sites under consideration for you plan. You'll welcome the changes as conducive to meeting the goals set for your advertising.

It will be incumbent upon you, the advertiser or agency, to be sure that the creative is well-suited to the media that the advertising will be running in or adjacent to.

Given the typically short nature of a holiday media schedule, the opportunities for robust creative and placement testing will be limited. If you have a data-driven campaign, it is going to be difficult to run optimization against the effort.

Holiday indifference

If the campaign you've planned, or are planning to plan, does not have a holiday focus, then it won't matter so much if the sites or networks you are using alter their content or layout to accommodate their own move towards a temporary holiday focus.

Certainly, if you are selling Wicca Wear, then advertising adjacency with content about Santa Claus or the birth of Christ isn't appropriate. Ads for the "Left Behind" series probably aren't a fit with a site featuring recipes for latkes and marshmallow dreidels. But this is a basic media planning and placement consideration: textual relevance.

What matters is that the placements you contracted for are the placements you get. The person with whom you have a relationship at the media property should know enough about the sites he or she represent to keep you forewarned of any significant content or architectural changes.

A long-term buy

Say I've bought a placement on a site for a media buy with a long schedule. The media has been running since June. Now the site is going to make some changes for the holidays, but my buy runs through the end of the year.

If this is the case, it is incumbent in this instance for the site's representatives to keep you -- the media planner -- abreast of forthcoming changes and, if those changes are going to affect the media in any material way, to offer you a makegood or alternative placement that is equal to or greater than the original in value.

Most of the time, however, sites -- particularly larger publishers -- are going to know well in advance that changes are going to be made to the site.

A friend at AOL told me that their advertisers, and in particular their retail partners, know long ahead of time what kinds of changes are going to be made to the site or sites for the holidays.

AOL regularly makes changes for holidays -- Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Valentine's Day, et cetera. Much like magazines have editorial calendars, AOL has a promotional calendar usually set far in advance so that those advertisers with media running during a holiday period know what kinds of changes will be made, and take that into consideration when originally planning their media.

If changes are going to be made that do not materially affect your media placements or the context they are found in, don't worry about it. If changes are going to tweak your media in such a way that you or the client are not comfortable with, work on a solution as soon as you can.

If a solution can't be found, look at your insertion order and the terms and conditions against which your buy has been made. The IAB/AAAAs Terms and Conditions address circumstances for makegoods when significant changes to a website are made after such time as the buy has been signed off on and placed.

The only way to truly ensure that your media will not be hurt or hindered by changes to the sites on a plan is to have good, open and honest communication with the people you work with at the site. In an era where email and IM are used more frequently to communicate than phone calls or in-person meetings, relationships with media vendors might not be as strong as they should be.

Establishing a good relationship with the vendor, taking their calls when they call (so long as it isn't five times a day), and asking questions and listening to answers will keep you well informed of changes that might be made in conjunction with the holiday season. At the best of times, this information will give you a lead on a unique media opportunity not before considered for your client's media plan.