Brand Managers - Control Freaks??

You cannot stop a surfer from surfing and noticing, but you cannot measure 'how much?'. Simply because, you cannot really engage the consumer browsing on a website which happens to have your brand communicating loudly to 'pick me up', to be actually picked up. The mental block of payments over the net still persists and that is exactly what 'STOPS' people from transacting a business. Though the servers have been made more secure it still doesnt push the consumer to be free with vital information to be fed on the net. So catching eyeballs is a definite but catching 'wallets' still a dream!! 

A good question and a great explanation leading to it. TO answer your question in a nutshell, definitely i wouldnt want to control brand communication on the net because of two simple reasons - 1) the net is a vast bottomless pit which is still rediscovering itself and 2) tracking devices arent perfect in the sense that though i may log onto toostep, i dont necesserily need to browse through but then the tracker will register me as having seen the banner ad on the home page. 

The nets very interactiveness and easy spread makes it an ideal brand communication platform. And success of your brand can only be measures to an extent if your brand is tagges to an online sales platform. Wherein the number of online purchases can effectively measure your brand power and its communicating tool.

The basic here being the measureability aspect of the communicating medium. Like you right said non-interactive media is easily trackable and measured but not the internet. I wouldnt agree with tracking devices like google alert or google ads because they are susceptible to corruption at source. One can log infrom different IP addresses in a single day and increase the number of hits with no way of knowing that it is the same person who has seen ur message umpteen times.
The trick here would be to limit yourself to stuff like viral brnading which marketers are increasingly turning to on the net with great success. Plus a few banner ads on home pages of the main mail sites like yahoo, google etc. 

So if you are a marketer with ample internet budgets, then my advise would be to play it safe and not go in for unchartered territories. Even traditional methods like email shots can be quite persuasive if attractively done.