Pricing is one of the most important - and mysterious - parts of a business. Price too high, and you lose customers; price too low, and you leave lots of profit on the table. An entire price consulting industry exists, with great leaders like Patrick Campbell of Pricing Intelligently. One important rule of thumb is that input costs should almost never determine the price of a product. What your costs do is have two effects:

Great technology companies have been built on advertising: Google, Facebook, Yahoo (in the old days), not to mention many a magazine, newspaper and television network. I have always loved the operational side of ad networks. They require building and managing a systems whose data throughput and reliability requirements rival a financial pricing and trading system. I have managed several of those, and the parallels are quite strong. What truly interests me in advertising, though, is the brilliance of great creativity.