Something called Cannes Lions 2005, described as “the world’s biggest international advertising festival,” was held this week.

With one of the biggest attractions of online advertising being its accountability relative to other media, it’s a shame that at least the online portion of the awards didn’t include some sort of actual metrics. Did the award-winning sites demonstrably increase sales or awareness? Did the award-winning virals actually get passed along?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Takeaway for marketers: Ask yourself: Do you want your campaign to win awards or sell stuff?

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
—Albert Einstein

I Googled “marketing.” Got about 227,000,000 results.

Then I Googled “ethics.” Got about 61,500,000 results.

Does this mean that as a society we’re nearly four times more concerned about marketing than we are about ethics?

(And yes, that’s an actual AdWords ad that came up. Good thing, too. Aren’t we all looking for a great deal on ethics? Must be all kinds of great stuff in that huge selection — maybe I can pick up a decent categorical imperative at a low bid.)

Then I Googled “marketing ethics.”

Got about 31,800 results.

The C|Net story in my inbox bore a subject line with the name “Jack Kilby.” Being perpetually overwhelmed with email as I am, I thought I saw the name Jack Kirby, the extraordinary comic book artist, so I opened the mail.

Okay, Kilby, not Kirby. I read the obituary anyway, then I Googled a bit and found this and this and a few others. I’d never heard of him. You probably hadn’t, either. Well, it’s not as if he’s a household name, like Paris Hilton. He only did work that had enormous impact on the entire world.

While he didn’t help create The Fantastic Four, he did invent a little thing called the integrated circuit, which pretty much changed everything about the way we live. As this Texas Instruments page on Jack explains, “It was this breakthrough that made possible the sophisticated high-speed computers and large-capacity semiconductor memories of today’s information age.” Robert Noyce of Intel came up with the same general idea six months later, but hey — everyone remembers Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, relatively few people recall that Buzz Aldrin was right behind him.

Heck, yeah, he deserved a statue. And that 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics, too.

You may have heard that a .xxx domain is on the way. Maybe. It’s not a done deal, but an application has been approved. WorldNetDaily has a good article about it.

Everyone knows online porn is out there. Everyone knows it’s big. Did you realize how big? Well, here are a few stats according to Internet Filter Review (which, one would think, has something of a vested interest in these numbers; still, I have to think they’re not that far off):

The online porn industry generates $57 billion worldwide … Porn revenue is larger than all combined revenues of all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises … 12% of all web sites are porn sites … 25% of all search engine requests are porn-related … 90% of kids 8 to 16 have viewed porn online …Here’s a particularly nasty one: Child porn generates $3 billion annually.

Yep, this is the world we live in. As an online marketer and a parent, I support the creation of a .xxx domain, and I hope efforts to segregate online porn to that domain are successful. This will make it easier for libraries and parents to filter out porn (not that filters can’t be circumvented, but that’s a separate issue). It will also help raise the level of confidence the average consumer has about the Internet in general. Because let’s face it: This can be a skanky neighborhood where we do business, and everyone knows it. Let’s clean it up a bit.

It’s not a question of morals or free speech. It’s common sense.