The premise and big promise of online display advertising has been that it could ultimately free advertisers from the "blind spending" of traditional media. Unfortunately in actual practice measurement and accountability often open up more questions than answers for marketers, and create more confusion than clarity. Therein lies the current quandary of online advertising, at least on the brand and display side. Addressing this quandary is clearly going to be a pressing topic of the next few years, making the heretofore mostly esoteric topic of attribution analysis an increasingly hot-button one.
