...which will hopefully make the creatives (vs. space and time) what the ad industry pays for! yeehaw.

Agreed. I'm on record as saying that banners were dead a long, long time ago. But what I have spent the last few days doing?...judging banners for an industry award (ADC). After about 200 of them I can honestly say there is nothing there that I would have had any pleasure in creating. The lure of an award - any award! - is just too strong for some people.

There was one neat idea for a photo sharing site but it wasn't paid for media - in the sense that you're talking about. Beyond that, clients do 'pay' for a website, or to be on twitter, etc etc but yeah, the notion of forcing someone to look at something when they would rather do something else is hopefully coming to a close as this generation of ad execs and clients get canned.

This industry is still so young. It barely knows how to crawl let alone walk or run. Digital 'creatives' - whatever the fuck that means - will just figure out what needs to be done - the web (+whatever) refuses to be pigeonholed into easy media categories that can be purchased. So the smart peeps, will as they have been doing since day one, figure out a new way to do stuff. That's what's so fun about the whole thing!

I totally agree, 100%.

With that said, I've been thinking more and more about online paid media lately as a place to do awesome stuff (I think I've mostly been thinking this because as soon as everyone -- including me -- starts bashing on something my first instinct is that everyone -- including me -- is probably wrong). I think paid media is broken in a few very specific ways (which, in an effort to be fully transparent, I think we should start trying to solve):
1. We should stop designing to specs and start designing to sites: Check out this IBM ad -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/heyitsnoah/3264028858/ -- it's done custom for the New York Times and includes mentions of the company in the paper. It expands so that you can actually read the story in the media. But most importantly, it doesn't look like advertising it looks like content.
2. This is actually coming off number 1, but basically if we shift this way of thinking, clients need to come along with us. Essentially this means two fairly big changes: a) A larger portion of the budget is going to need to go to production (I know that sounds fishy coming from a company that makes stuff, but I speak from the heart) and b) We're going to need to move away from thinking about most of this media as direct response (search is great for direct response and you can do DR banners, but you should pay for them CPC/CPA).
3. (Again, this builds on the last point.) If you're not going to think of this as direct response, how should you think about it? Well, I think you think of it as hosted content. Maybe it's just a dumb semantic thing, but we shouldn't be brainstorming by thinking about the media space, but rather thinking about the sites we'd like to host our content. I think part of the problem with creative around paid online media is that people think BANNER and no matter how many times you tell them to open up their thinking they still think BANNER.
4. There is one more option in this whole thing (actually there are probably lots more) and that's the one where media companies start acting a lot more like creative shops (which they are). Increasingly I've found that we go to media companies for ideas as well, after all, they know what works and doesn't on their site pretty damn well.

Yeah, so there's that. Just some thinking out loud.

@noah as you surely know, this notion of advertising as content is all over the place:

http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/advertising-as-distributed-content-sampling.html

http://www.zeusjones.com/blog/2009/where-is-the-value-in-the-print-media-industry/#comment-11005

@noah - oops, my comment to you just turned into another post. ;)

@Stephanie: Yup, I know. But it's still mostly talk.

Noah, if you don't mind, i'm going to add a 5th to your list, and staying with the theme it builds on the last point.

5. We also need digital media agencies to STOP planning/buying impression-based media campaigns. The media planning process can no longer be used as a way to defend digital's role (read: % of overall media budget) against TV & Print media plans. Typically this boils down to proving that digital can reach just as much of the target as TV & Print. And to their defense, media agencies are forced to "sell" their plans this way b/c most clients struggle to evaluate media plans in ways other than reach.

So what we, as digital design agencies (i stress DESIGN, not CREATIVE, but that is on a separate topic related to @bmorrissey's post) is having to create one-size fits all display ads; and "size" goes well beyond specs in this case. Rather than doing what we all know is more effective and "creative." Thinking about ideas on a site by site, contextual basis. When you have a plan with 10-15 sites on it and a production budget (to Noah's point #2) that only supports 3 different versions of a banner, it becomes very hard to make it work. Could you imagine the smile that would come across the face of a designer when you tell them there are 5 sites on this campaign and they get to come up with an idea for each site?!

(NOTE: the above opinion does not represent those of a digital marketer that believes we need more display ads. Thank you.)

For what it's worth, i think i'm going to post my thoughts on DIGITAL DESIGN vs DIGITAL CREATIVE on @bmorrissey's blog so this comment doesn't get any longer...

Thanks for keeping the dialogue going Rick.