“Logic and over-analysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea,” Bernbach said, “It’s like love – the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears.” Such notions seem quaint today, in the age of web analysis, as data and analytics guide marketing and publishing budgets and increasingly become the currency of media. While some lament that digital over-analysis is indeed taking a toll on the creative quality of commercial communications, creative developers continue to take solace in the fact that they still hold sway in the design of Flash experiences, whose effects will be evaluated later – for now. And many have dutifully been instrumenting their designs with tracking pixels for years to make them more transparent – with mixed results.

But what happens when they’re introduced to their new cube-mate, an analyst trained in Omniture products who will look over their shoulder and suggest where to put the data collection tags and how to incorporate design elements aimed at real-time optimization? Such a collaboration might produce breakthrough results. Or it might not.

Bernbach is also credited with introducing the idea of the creative team consisting of a copywriter and an art director, which transformed how advertising was designed. Before Bernbach, we’re told, advertising concepts were thought up by copywriters who handed them off to art directors to illustrate. The team concept energized and accelerated the creative process. (Developers may wish to draw analogy to the “pair programming” technique associated with agile methodologies.) Could teaming up creative developers with analysts using a common Flash platform produce similar benefits? Well…

Creative developers tend to be holistic, “right-brain” thinkers who may naturally resist decomposing concepts into measurable units. Analysts tend to be reductionists, inclined to embrace such decomposition and measurement. Top-down organizational initiatives are unlikely to address the issues impeding their successful collaboration.

So, while most commercial web development interests appreciate the need for increased transparency and accountability in their efforts, the question of how best to integrate analytics with web design as a practical matter remains thorny, and the impact of Adobe’s integration efforts will depend not just on Adobe’s execution, but on industry-wide attempts to evolve the web development process in line with Adobe’s vision.

Two factors were noteworthy. First, Google continues to see strongest growth on its own search results pages, while growth on the Google network remains flat. This is good news for Google’s bottom line, as it doesn’t have to pay for traffic on its own sites as it does for AdSense partners, but for the partners, not so good. Secondly, and perhaps more worrisome for online publishers, is the negative growth rate of TAC itself (that is, the fees Google pays to sites in its network that carry its ads). Google showed a graph underscoring this negative TAC growth as a positive for shareholders, but, as the industry knows, Google is the financial wellspring for a great many websites, so negative TAC means less for the world at large.

The chart below illustrates how small adjustments in TAC can have large impact on the after-TAC growth of Google’s network revenue.

Might Google’s lower TAC rates open the door for more competition in the ad network world? Unfortunately for Google’s competition, Google’s reported TAC rate – the payouts divided by network revenue – remain at around 88%, significantly higher than what ad networks appear able to achieve, so it’s very unclear that publishers will be able to do much better elsewhere, particular since many reports indicate ad network display CPMs are dropping (here’s an example from PubMatic and another from The Rubicon Project [registration required]).

But will things change? One comment Google CEO Eric Schmidt made was telling in this regard. In the context of discussing the near-complete state of the DoubleClick integration, he remarked on the benefits of DoubleClick as being, “to bring the science of search to the art of display.” This was reminiscent of Yahoo!’s recent refrain about “search/display convergence” and summarizes why Yahoo! is reluctant to sell its search business to Microsoft. Microsoft has made similar observations, and when those three speak similarly of developments, chances are they’re for real.

Mr. Schmidt and others also talked about the accountability of search, and how accountability means that falling consumer spending is bound to reflect directly on search revenue. Beyond this is a movement, led by Microsoft, to revise the way accountability is measured for online advertising. Historically, by convention, credit for a sale or conversion has been awarded to the last event before the conversion, which has generally been a click on a search page – most likely Google’s search page. Last year Microsoft sought to change this when it announced “Engagement Mapping” which would count all exposures (e.g., banners) within a given period leading up to a conversion.

A recent Gartner survey has shown that advertisers and agencies in the main are still mostly using conventional metrics to calculate ROI, but perhaps increased pressure for accountability will accelerate a move toward broader considerations, which could reverse last year’s trend which showed search gaining share over display advertising online.

Google’s network advertising business (which includes both AdSense for Search and AdSense for Content), when you remove TAC, is only about 6% the size of its Google.com search revenue. But that (along with its still-tiny “licensing and other” revenue) is the portion to watch if you’re looking for an industry health-check.

“Necessito pro populus specto nostrum insigne!” the CMO would shout.

“Necessito nostrum argentum conservo,” the CFO would reply.

This dialog continues in modern times. Today, CMOs can point to a large body of evidence that companies which cut brand marketing budgets in a recession are generally worse off in the long run than those that don’t. CFOs, faced with limited options, will continue to cut all spending that can’t be directly tied to revenue.

Historically this has been good news for sales promoters and direct marketing firms willing tie fees to performance, and bad news for mainstream media. Today we see Google benefiting from this effect, as search marketers have been adept at demonstrating the direct connection between clicks and sales.

But, runs the refrain, what about branding?

This may be the first recession for which we can see glimmers of solutions to the long sought problem of making brand advertising accountable. Although it will never be possible to eliminate risk from advertising, the tools that are now emerging for measuring the effects of brand messages (both one’s own and one’s competitors’) all the way down the sales funnel are making marketing investments far more transparent and accountable than at any time in history.

The tools I’m talking about are the subject of an upcoming research note, but here’s one thought to tie this back to some recent conversations about social media: when heading into the next ad budget meeting, arm yourself with some examples of dialogs occurring about your brand and your competition in the social media sphere. Ask the question, what do you think will happen if we stop the conversation with our customers?

Then start talking about reallocating spending to media that are more effective and measurable than the old viaduct walls.