In the old model, the advertiser gets to take liberties with the reader/listener/viewer: stick advertising in their faces at will, with top prizes going to those who intrude so effectively that the ad is "unmissable".
Inside the media owners, typically this pits the sales department against editorial, but in the end, the money earned usually shouts louder than the goodwill lost.
The "pop-up" is the worst example of this kind of intrusion. It's the ultimate in unmissable advertising, a status it achieves by also being the most annoying form of advertising on the planet.
So it's impressive that the online media owners have been steadily closing them down, despite the enthusiasm of old-school media buyers to stick with them.
Nonetheless, the best advertising happens when people are not being treated like a target audience; when they do not feel advertised at. The absolute need for lightness of touch is not news.
The newest media are recognising that high-calibre communication with the consumer is so easily broken that they simply cannot take any liberties.
Symptomatic of such tiptoe media is in-game advertising.
The appeal of the audience and the difficulty of reaching them through conventional media are beyond doubt.
The medium allows regionally distinctive copy and real-time reporting via the online connections that are an integral part, even of console games. So this is not in the "interesting but unaccountable" category of new media ideas.
Neither is it niche; recent figures for the online game Counter Strike count more than five billion player minutes a month - a level of involvement that underwrites market expectations of 50% game revenue growth in 2007.
The technology supports all kinds of groovy stuff, from in-game posters (a new media is born - "indoor") to mini-video ads emerging from in-game drinks, trainers or pizza.
But "brand-slapping", as the gamers have dubbed it, only serves to position the advertiser as an idiot in the eyes of his potential customer.
The challenge for our industry is to know when advertising that tries to stamp its mark is a waste of money, because only tiptoe works.
- Richard Eyre is chairman of the IAB richard.eyre@haymarket.com.