Preparing our presentation for this week’s Morgan Keegan conference got me thinking about how the online advertising technology ecosystem really does work.

To date, we’ve let an ambitious sell-side investment banker frame our industry. I’m shocked! Shocked that he says there are several dozen key categories, with over 300 relevant players. Let’s run a different play. Instead of viewing our industry through the eyes of someone who profits from it (and from portraying it as fragmented and complex), let’s view it through the eyes of advertisers, whose billions of dollars always have paid for and always will pay for media model businesses.

Online advertising is a classic supply chain. Like any supply chain, you can count the number of truly critical “hops” on one hand. There are buyers. There are sellers. There is a marketplace where they meet. There are companies that smartly pull together what helps buyers buy better. There are companies that smartly pull together what helps sellers sell better. That’s really it. See my high-level sketch view here:

Reflecting perhaps our industry’s immaturity, (the collective) we have hyper focused on helping buyers buy better in the smaller piece of the spend pie (DR). Green field, we built closed loop optimization technology and process management perfectly suited for advertisers for whom “click=money”. Then, did we heed Willie Sutton and move quickly to bring perfectly suited technology and process management to brand advertising, which has, no joke, 50% more available spend? Hell No! Most recently, we’ve shifted our obsession to sell-side optimization. Very valuable yes, very lucrative yes. The most valuable most lucrative opportunity? Hell No! That we shamble along ceding to TV year after year. On a positive note, like all procrastinators eventually do, we’ve run out of places to hide. The challenge of securing brand advertising spending is all that’s left.

Since it’s a large opportunity, we always can (and oh we will) keep flinging bright shiny objects at brand advertisers. Ad units as big! 2X as big! 5X as big! as the pages they actually run on. Toilet paper purchase intender targeting. But if those are our Big Ideas, we’ll never make a solid dent in, never mind supplant, TV as brand advertising’s media of choice.

95% of what brand advertisers sell is sold offline. In a store. In a car dealership. In a movie theater. Brand managers’ careers rise or fall on proving they drive high volume high ROI increases of case movement in stores, cars off lots, people into cineplexes. Their multi-billion dollar employer corporations rise or fall in the stock market based on whether or not all those individual efforts, rolled up, add up to very high volume high ROI increases. And, remember, these needed “increases” are for businesses that already have multi-billion dollar top and bottom lines. So…

Real Sales in Real Stores.Real Sales in Real Stores. Real Sales in Real Stores. Silicon Valley’s Type A kids always psyche themselves up with a team chant just before the game begins. Let’s psyche ourselves up. Drive real sales in real stores. Prove we drive real sales in real stores. Prove we power brand advertisers’ real financial growth. When we do, that long-awaited second phase of online advertising hyper growth will finally begin.

See you Wednesday in Half Moon Bay.