The Wall Street Journal recently reported that “in the first six months of 2010, advertisers spent $627 million on video ads,” a significant increase from the year-ago period. This statistic makes it clear that online video’s combination of sight, sound and motion is an especially effective one for advertisers, something that comes as no surprise to broadcast veterans. The addition of interactive capabilities further enhances the user experience and increases advertiser benefit.

What’s also clear from this figure is that marketers, agencies, publishers, technology enablers, industry groups and networks have done a tremendous job of creating and nurturing a growing segment of advertising that delivers value at virtually unprecedented scale. But in order to maintain this pace of growth, each of the stakeholders need to rally around maintaining advertiser value. For the ecosystem to thrive, all parties need to ask themselves: “Am I delivering on the marketer’s goals?”

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Today we announced the launch of mobile video advertising across our network. In spite of this, I feel strongly that mobile video advertising is fundamentally irrelevant and will eventually be removed from the pool of industry jargon.

What makes me think this? Mobile video is irrelevant because the medium doesn’t change anything about our ability to offer scale, targeting, optimization or performance media to our advertisers. In addition, mobile video advertising is served in a nearly identical way to online video (i.e., a forced view before the consumption of free content), so the experience of viewing the ad doesn’t change the way it’s consumed or performs.

Touting mobile video ads is the equivalent of touting media tied to a certain type of computer (laptop video ads), browser (Chrome video ads) or type of location (college video ads). Advertisers very rarely target ads based on the type of computer, browser or location category, and it is safe to assume that mobile will not be separated from online for most campaigns in the future.

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Daytime soap operas, with very few exceptions, are dead.

On October 5, 2009, CBS canceled “Guiding Light,” the longest running television drama in history, which began in 1952. This September, CBS will air the last episode of “As The World Turns,” the Proctor & Gamble production that has been running for more than 50 years. What’s more, ad dollars allocated to soaps fell nearly 30 percent from 2005 to 2009, and then fell another 20 percent in the first half of 2010.

So, why is all of this happening?

The television media has argued that the death of soap operas is the result of both women entering the workforce in increased numbers and the popularity of reality shows, the latter of which provides an alternate means to achieving the emotional gratification originally delivered by soap operas. I would, however, propose an alternate reading of events.

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