Moderator: John Durham, CatalystSF
Panelists:
John Vincent, Eyewonder
Sean Finnegan, Starcom Mediavest
Randy Kilgore, Tremor Media
Tod Sacerdoti, Brightroll
Mike Henry, Veoh

Kilgore: Pre-roll has gone full cycle. It got its bad rap, and now its come back and is very popular. It got a bad reputation because it was being placed in front of content that people weren’t sure had any value. Now that it is associated with better content, the value proposition is clear. A :15 second pre-roll in front of two minutes of content is something people are very comfortable with. Now we’re focusing on tying it all together on the back-end with advanced reporting.

John Vincent, Eyewonder: People thing about pre-roll as repurposed TV, but the perception should be about the placement. Its an increadibly powerful spot, especially ahead of premium content. Pre-roll is the most valuable location. Understand the opportunity and then execute against it. Don’t think about it as repurposed TV spots.

Mike Henry, Veoh: I don’t know that the location makes it more valuable. Part of our own research has shown that the more time people spend with a video, the more engaged they become. They are more likely to rate it, to send it to a friend.

Tod Sacerdoti, Brightroll: We don’t see any ad unit as dominant as pre-roll. The two things we focus on a getting quality content at scale, and can we get pricing at rates that people are comfortable scaling their budgets. I’m bullish on pre-roll

Q: When can we get sustainable standards?

Sean: Standard metrics is still key. The ability to bridge the gap with the people who are buying TV is one of the ways to allow the ad dollars and inventory to flow. You also need to preserve the unique elements of online video, like the ability to track purchase intent and filtering down the funnel. But we need to align these universes and understand that it is the same user across multiple platforms. In the digital industry, we tend to stay down in the weeds a little too much.

John Vincent: Until recently, it has been technically impossible for publishers to have the same tracking and interaction metrics. So we’ve rolled out a universal metric that Adobe and Microsoft are adopting.

Kilgore: I don’t understand why we even need to have this conversation. Before digital, we were still aggregating audiences across platforms and figuring out how they work together. Maybe its because in 2001 we needed to show how different and special we were.

Sean: My point is that we just need to be able to find a way to do more of it. But there are some fundamental hurdles.

Tod: The reason I think measurement is so important is that ads have ways of finding themselves in places that advertisers don’t want them to be. Campaigns tend to be optimized for a number of different metrics, but we need to be able to give advertisers the trust that the placements are way they should be.

Mike: High CPMs are going to need to be justified, especially in the short run. But if you wan to compete with the scale of TV, you wont be able to charge those high CPMs that will finance and support the industry. I’d expect that the CPMs will go through the roof because we can narrowcast our message to the audience that is relevant and measure its impact.

John: You can measure what you get on TV, and then all the interactivity on top of it.

Is the money following the video? Why aren’t we getting $75-$100 CPMs for targeted campaigns?

Tod: We need to show the efficacy. And the interoperability isn’t there yet.

Mike: I’m skeptical that the CPMs will be higher than TV. You could argue that TV is overpriced right now. The dollars will flow when the pricing is more competitive. But there’s a tendency to hold on to those higher CPMs.

Kilgore: I think the issue is slightly different. The money comes from the marketer to the agency for planning. And then the portions get sent to digital or other places, but that hasn’t really changed. There’s a reason that the money goes to TV first. They see the broadcaster’s digital extension programs, but they haven’t been exposed to the real online video market. Where the pricing will fall will be up to us to show the value of our audiences, our targeting, and our benefits.

Audience Q: We’re hearing that DRM is part of the problem shifting TV ads over to online.

Randy: We hear that about 10-15% of the time. I’m surprised at this point that people aren’t securing those rights.

Audience Q: Are the networks doing a better job building an ecosystem around their video content than the agencies are on a campaign basis?

Sean: I think the networks are odin ga fantastic job. My agency is there in lock-step with them and continue to work with them on multiple levels to find more opportunities. We’re big fans of pre-roll and buy it a lot, but we’re also interested in further, deeper innovation.

Audience Q: A pet peeve of mine is seeing auto play video on a home page. Are those ‘real’ streams or not? Would you buy them?

Sean: No. If we knew that was happening, we wouldn’t by that.

Mike: If we could prove that those units were less effective, it would be easier to weed them out of the mix.

What are you doing in your organizations to help people move away from the UGC perception of video?

Mike: What we’re trying to understand is the relative engagement and effectiveness of the different types of content. What is different about web content – not UGC – that is different from Lost of Heros online.

John Vincent: Risk vs Reward. You have marketers who are looking for an advantage. You look at costs and you look at downside risk. If the risk is greater than the incremental upside benefit, you just eliminate that from the buy.

What frustrates you most about our industry?

John V: I wouldn’t say frustrated, but I’m fearful about 2009 and losing all the progress we made in 2008. How do we learn from what we did in 08 and do more in ’09. Marketers can either cut costs.

Randy Kilgore: We’ve come so far, and we’re talking about a lot of the same things, but when you balance that against all of the great things going on, its hard to get frustrated at all. I’m more concerned about the things going on with Congress that could derail our whole industry.

Sean: I’m a bit more positive. In this tough economic time, I think we’re going to grow up as a business and see how we can advance while the pressure is on.

Mike: I’m also more positive and excited about what will happen in the next year.

What is an interesting website that you go to?

John Durham: SlideShare
Mike: Veoh obviously
Tod: Search for “retargeting” and see how often they find you over the next week.
Sean: There’s a new site called Facebook
Randy: SeatGuru.com.
John Durham: Hopstop.com

The Metropolitan Opera, through PermissionTV, is now offering Met Player, a new online subscription streaming service that continues to expand the Met’s use of digital media.

The Met Player will offer subscribers access to 170 full-length performances—including 13 operas shot in high-definition video, 37 standard-definition videos, and 120 historic audio recordings. Selections from the Met’s video and audio archives will be available to opera-lovers everywhere and at any time. Perfect for the audiophile and videophile crowd that classical fans tend to be (see DVD-A and SACD demographics).

In addition to online viewing, users can extend their Met Player experience by connecting their computers to HD TV sets and home-stereo sound systems. PermissionTV and the Met are leveraging Move Network’s technology to power the player.

Much hyped, much maligned video portal Joost is set to relaunch tomorrow, this time, sans download. Oddly, the logins from my previous accounts don’t seem to work, so I’m guessing there will be plenty of signing up again. Unfortunately, in my attempts to sign back up, I keep getting a “Something went wrong, please try again later” message.

Keep your fingers crossed for these guys. They can’t afford to botch another launch.

Looks like mashup makers Eyespot are shutting their doors. In an email to account holders, and on a page when users log in, members received the following message:

To Our Users and Customers

We deeply regret to inform you that Eyespot Corporation will no longer be able to continue serving you.

For our users at eyespot.com, we’re no longer allowing you to upload new videos. We’ll soon be providing you with a simple means of retrieving your uploaded videos and video mixes from within your account.

For our business customers in the eyespot video network, your site will continue operate unaffected for a limited period of time. We encourage you to migrate your video solution to one of our competing providers in the video mixing: Kaltura, and video publishing space: Fliqz immediately. We’ll soon be providing you with the means of downloading your community videos from within your dashboard at http://eyespot.com/partnerDashboard. Look for “Download: Click to save.” under each media thumbnail in your galleries.

We have spent three years providing over a hundred thousand of you with a unique video experience. We believed that by putting creative tools and rights-cleared media into the hands of influencers and connectors, Eyespot would enable social media and participation culture like no other company.

After playing over two hundred million of your video creations, we have to stop. After assembling possibly the most potent team in digital media ever, we’re now moving on.

Thank you all for being part of our community over the past three years.

Jim Kaskade
President & CEO

Searching for good content online can be a pain in the ass. If your friend doesn’t send you a link, or you aren’t trolling YouTube for hours, you’re more likely to find a podcast that is already dead than discover the next cool show. With the volume of new webisodes being created, and only increasing, what we could use is a trustworthy source to do all that trolling for us, find the best of the best, and make it nice and easy for us to choose from.

Enter TheWebisodes.com, a new portal for webisodic content. Consider them the new TV Guide of web programming. Not just a guide, The Webisodes has its own show, The Weekly Webisode Watch (hmmm, kinda crimping on our name, but we’ll let it slide), that features co-founders Gil and Oran Margulis chatting about their favorite shows.

For those of you with your own programming, TheWebisodes is syndication friendly, hosting shows on their site or delivering users to your own site. Got content, make sure you tell the brothers at TheWebisodes.com. Finally, a portal page for the videophile crowd.

This is even better. The CA Democractic Party rented a digital billboard across from the Sarah Palin rally at LA’s Home Depot Center, where users can text questions to be displayed on the board.

To submit a question for our electronic billboard, text the keyword ASK then the question to the number 69866

For example, send to 69866: ASK You said you’d run a respectful campaign on the issues, what happened?

Keep your questions under 160 characters including spaces and remember to keep them family friendly since we’re showing them in public.

Watch live: (5pm EST, 2pm PST)

Continuing the hit parade of A-list actors making their foray into the online video world, former Friend Lisa Kudrow will be starring in “Web Therapy,” a branded entertainment effort for Lexus.

Unlike the “Smart Girls at the Party,” with Amy Poehler, introduced last week by ON Networks, Kudrow’s series is conceptualized, created and delivered by the brand. Sandy Blanchard, owner experience manager at Lexus’ marketing division told the Hollywood Reporter that the luxury cars will only be woven into the stories “when relevant and appropriate.” That said, there were no additional syndication partners mentioned, leaving us to believe that users will have to visit the L Studio to take in the show (and the brand), or rely on folks like us to embed it for you.

Oddly, she also told the HR that, “We kind of look at ourselves as a broadband HBO.” But as previously mentioned by OVW, HBO is broadband HBO.

Session Description:
When will supply of premium inventory become outstripped by demand? What effects will this have on the online video marketplace? Some advertisers would argue there is a glut of quality, premium inventory online. Some would say there is almost infinite inventory. Who is correct? Can premium video actually command a premium on price? Are video ad networks killing the price and creating a low cost marketplace for video that hurts the chances for growth? These will all be discussed in this session.
Moderator:
Jason Glickman, CEO, Tremor Media
Speakers:
Steven Comfort, YuMe, VP, Advertising Sales
Carrie Kelly, VP Ad Sales, Funny Or Die
Christine Peterson, VP Digital Media Director, Carat
Shoba Purushothaman, CEO, The NewsMarket
Lewis Rothkopf, Network Development, Brightroll

A: Peterson: The question isn’t whether or not it was produced by a professional company, but whether or not there is a technology to alieviate their fears of being associated with pornography or inappropriate language. They don’t really care about the resolution of the video.

Q: If the content were determined to be safe, would that warrant a higher CPM?

Peterson: Sure. If we could have the same reach, then yes. A consumer may be even more passionate about that content.

A: We also need to look at things in the broader context. The super-premium content is usually a byproduct of a broader TV deal, and not really a true measure of CPMs .

Christine: Some of the models for super-premium content is built around purchasing a block, as opposed to the majority of digital content which is purchased on CPM or per stream basis. While that sounds nice, it most cases, they are just repurposing their TV spots. We’re seeing frequency of 7 exposures per session, not just when they come back. We’re looking for 1-2 impressions in an in-stream environment. Overall, those super-premium buys have a negative impact. As someone who tried to catch up on a season of 30 Rock, I hope I never see an ad for super scrubber again.

Glickman: Publishers need to balance the frequency capping with their ability to make money.

Q: From a supply and demand standpoint, there is a lot of noise that all of the video inventory is UGC. When you look at the volume of video inventory on tier-two sites, often times it exceeds what you can find on top-tier sites. What is the roll of video ad networks in a supply demand and value?

A: Brightroll: You can’t possibly overstate the value of video ad networks in this environment. The goal is to supplement what the publisher is doing on their own, and help the agency get the buys across a broader array of quality publishers while avoiding the pitfalls that comes with trying to do that. But you’ve got all of these different player types, formats for them to deal with. As far is the publisher is concerned, you get very competitive CPMs, but not what you’d get if they sold it themselves. But what often happens is “The Spitzer Effect.” You get a huge spike in traffic, and then you have a ton of unsold inventory.

Carrie: As a publisher, there is a need for ad networks. When we did the Paris Hilton video, we had a 16x spike in traffic. But nobody has the chance to pre-sell something like that. What we need to figure out is how to have something in-house that we can use to take advantage of that, and work together to increase the efficiency. We need to open up the dialogue on how the publishers and agencies can work together.

The behind the scenes is that we have to think about the end user. As a start up, we’d rather sacrifice some revenue to make sure that user comes back to us again. We want the right brands because we are building an audience as much as we are building the site.

Q: Are video ad networks hurting the CPMs?

Glickman: I think most of us would disagree with that. For standard ad networks that may be true, but not for video.

Brightroll: The people who run the video networks have been there before, and seen what happens. So we are determined as both former publishers to not go down that road again. We only sell on a CPM basis to make sure that CPMs don’t go down.

YuMe: We give our technology to the publishers we work with, and 99% of the time it is better technology than they already have. And that gives their sales team the ability to sell formats and analytics that they couldn’t deliver on their own.

Q: When it comes to formats, price and inventory, formats obviously play a role. How do we see the formats play into the conversation?

Carrie: On the day I started at Funny or Die, we said that there will be no pre-roll on our site, ever. We have to go back to the user experience. As Christine said, she was so annoyed that she’ll never buy a product. So we need to keep the user in mind and how we protect that experience.

Christine: Just to play devil’s advocate, the advertisers spend an enormous amount of money creating a :30 second spot. Not to say that it is the end all and be all, but they are still working. They still drive a brand message, equal to and above the performance on TV. Users are less annoyed than they are with TV, and we don’t see TV changing their ad model. When I say to an advertiser, “I need you to spend more money for the web,” they say “Forget it,” and spend the money where they know it is working.

Brighroll: One of the things that is really tense right now is the :30. In terms of branding and recall, they are the most effective unit out there. So you have the opportunity to do more than repurpose what you’ve got on TV. If you are targeting techies, they know the benefits of having more RAM, so you can exploit that opportunity to spend the time with them because you can deliver a much more targeted opportunity.

Christine: Coming from a media buying perspective, there’s only so much you can do and say to get them to test the waters in the space. Now we’re seeing interactive video, and we can create ad units for the space. But we need to create more case studies to prove that they work.

Q: How do we feel about formats as they pertain to the content? YouTube said they wouldn’t do pre-roll but would do overlays.

Christine: its less about who created it and more about length.

YuMe: The biggest problem is seeing a :30 second ad before a :15 second piece of content. But it is rare that we get more than one piece of creative. But technically we have the ability to do that.

Q: If you can create content that is an ad, but also something that is content and can stand on its own, is that something we see as the next big thing or is it a fad?

Carrie: It will continue, but it is really difficult. If you, the publisher, are doing everything from the script to the talent to the editing, then we are playing the agency, the producer and the publisher and then we need to go do the distribution as well. It’s a lot easier, like with the Dove campaign, where the agency did it, and seeded it. We can’t try to trick the consumer.

Brightroll: Trailers are a great example. They are entertainment, they are high def. There’s a burgeoning market for literary trailers, where they hire actors to create a commercial. Its entertainment that meets everyone’s need at once.

Q: Content doesn’t exist just on one site anymore. How does syndication, and hyper syndication, affect price?

A: YuMe: When you look at the widget world, where content appears on a blog or on facebook, the issue will become addressability. Can you tell who I am?

Q: Do top-tier sites warrant a higher rate than the same content farther down the tail?

Carrie: yes. If you can buy a targeted audience, if you can buy them in that bullzeye, then you should pay a premium for reaching them in a premium environment.

Brightroll: If you are having your content associated with premium, adjacent content, then you should pay for that association. But advertisers don’t necessarily see it that way.

Why?

Brightroll: One is safety. Advertisers pay to be associated with your brand.

YuMe: Demand and true scarcity will play a huge roll. Auto content, business and finance, travel, that will support higher prices across the board.

Q: With regards to TV, there is a comparison of CPMs. In general, people think that online CPMs are higher than TV. Should they be?

Christine: No. We don’t have the metrics to prove that we should pay higher prices for online. But you can’t compare them. Broadcast buyers buy cost-per-point.

Brightroll: Broadband should always be higher CPMs than TV. You have a lean forward audience. On TV, you have a cost-per-maybe. On the interactive side, someone is actively engaged.

Glickman: We’ve heard that the CPMs on TV have been watered down to address that cost-per-maybe.

Q: Is it an issue of education?

Peterson: Maybe, but what we hear from TV buyers is that they turn on the TV faucet, and the sales come in.

YuMe: When I worked in TV, we knew that we’d get exactly how many number of calls into a call center, exactly what time the spot will air. TV can be extremely precise. But when you are looking at an ad that is in a video player, you are waiting for that content to play, and you are very engaged. With TV, the push has been on to move away from show ratings and towards commercial ratings, and that cracked about two years ago. They are getting close to figuring out who watched the ad vs. who watched the show. But if you are on the Web, you are one click away from engaging with the advertiser. On TV, you have to get up, turn on the computer, etc., You are much farther away from that engagement.

Audience Q: What about convergence when TV and the Web come together?
Brightroll: All of the set top boxes run off of basic IP video. But there is no barrier to getting the same kind of ads and metrics off of the living room TV than off the computer. The technology is there. The convergence has happened. Its just a matter leveraging the data.

Audience Q: What goes into CPM rates, and why are they so much lower for UGC? What are the other inputs?

Christine: There is definite value to the body of content that we can trust. A lot of the established rates for the super premium placements happened because they were bought by broadcast buyers without being negotiated. They were set without any real rationale. There is also a lot of value added research that can help you prove whether or not something worked. With a lot of the premium content, you can do a lot more than with UGC. You can brand the entire environment if you’d like, which has a much longer impact than a UGC environment.

Is the flip side of better ad targeting a nosier, intrusive marketer who knows more about us than we care to share? It seems clear now that digital media must confront and resolve its natural tensions with privacy and security concerns before the industry can move forward. The weird science of behavioral tracking now snoops into our browsing, search, shopping, e-mail, and perhaps even online social network habits and physical location. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are consolidating networks and technologies in order to link together many of these user habits into deep profiles that allow precise targeting with scale. Have private companies ever been entrusted with so much information about private citizens? Despite industry assurances that personally identifiable data are not involved, marketers now have privacy advocates, the FTC, and legislators taking a hard look at whether a new age of marketing science requires new levels of regulation. What hurdles will the industry need to vault? Could digital marketing really survive if the fully opt-in system that many advocates propose is adopted? Are the best laid plans of marketing science going to hit a wall called privacy rights?

MODERATOR:
Wendy Davis, Senior Writer, MediaPost’s OnlineMediaDaily
SPEAKERS:
Eileen Harrington, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, Federal Trade Commission
Jeff Hirsch, President & CEO, Revenue Science
Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, Seton Hall Law School
Ari Schwartz, VP and Chief Operating Officer, The Center for Democracy and Technology
Mike Zaneis, Vice President, Public Policy, Interactive Advertising Bureau
Q: For years, BT campaigns have collected data anonymously, and used it to serve people ads. If it is anonymous, whats the problem?
A: Ari: We don’t consider it to be anonymous. If you have data about someone over time, that isn’t anonymous. The consumers show interest, and the debate is about how much data is being collected about them.
A: Frank: The tailoring of the user experience is important. Users want to know they have control over what is being collected about them. Users should have a persistent opt-out opportunity to maintain privacy for as long as they want.
A: Mike: There is a danger in collected info about people. Just because you can track someone over time doesn’t mean that its not anonymous. If it is not trackable back to a specific individual, there is less to be concerned about.

Q: Aren’t there instances where people who have been identified?
A: Mike: Yes, but lets not brand an entire industry because there is a potential for that to happen.
A: Hirsch: The debate is about what is PII and what isn’t. And that’s where the line is.

Ari: But you are taking your business model and applying it to policy. I’m suggesting that there are business models that definitely have something to fear. And that’s where you start to run afowl of the benefits of interactive media.
Q: Who owns the data? And does it matter from a privacy point of view?
Hirsch: Who owns it is partially a business issue. Whoever created the data should own it.
Eileen: The issue is also about control, not just privacy. The issue in the policy arena is that the facts are obscured. Congress and the FTC have continued to try to collect really good factual information about exactly what is being collected and how it is being used. Businesses that do this are obviously reluctant to be forthcoming in ways that have been meaningful. And the practice is constantly changing. Trying to define what is PII is a red herring. We just want to know what is being collected, how it is being used, and how it can be combined with other data. Those are the questions. The longer the debate goes on without really good, candid, reliable information, the more probable it is that policy wont be made. There’s a game of chicken being played. The longer businesses refuse to come forward, the more likely it is that policy will develop that people will complain about.
Frank: but there is also an issue about what is information and what are business and trade secrets in order to conduct business. There needs to be a lot more computer scientists and engineers in order to get at the guts of this.
Eileen: The FTC has a pretty good record for maintaining the confidentiality of trade secrets.
Mike: The process the FTC has undertaken has been the right one, and has been very deliberative. Private meetings and town halls have been a deliberative process, and been focused on what the business model is and what is the right approach. We get in to trouble when we start to speculate what might be possible in the future. There are a lot of things that are possible in an open-architecture environment. We need to focus on what IS going on vs. what we can imagine in our wildest dreams.

Q: But who would have imagined that AOL would have released search data?
Mike: But people knew they were collecting it. They just didn’t expect that it would be released.
Jeff: My mother didn’t understand that AOL was tracking all of her searches.
Ari: its about user control. If you run a business model that is counter to user control, policy makers will look into it. I’m not picking a winner or a loser, that’s just the reality of the process.
Eileen: There are types of information that are very sensitive, like searching for information on health conditions and then serving ads against it. I don’t think that most people know much about how data is being collected and used, or that it is explained clearly in a privacy policy. The difference between online vs offline is the volume of data, and the potential of aggregation that simply isn’t possible offline. What has changed since we started looking at behavioral targeting? Everything. The volume, the usage, the techniques, all of it. This is a very juicy policy issue in Washington, and business models are going to develop in a way that give consumers clear notice and a meaningful choice or it is going to get dumped.
Q: There has been self regulation for years, so why are we still having this discussion?
Jeff: Not everyone follows the guidelines, and the new BT companies that leverage ISP data raised the issue again and proved that people weren’t following the guidelines.
Eileen: Meaningful self regulation means policing. There are excellent examples of meaningful policing. Most advertising policing is done through self regulatory policy with real sanctions.
Q: how do you sanction a company that says it isn’t going to follow that self regulation policy?
Eileen: If companies don’t comply, then we take enforcement action.
Frank: I have a lot of worries about self regulation. There are a lot of opportunities for a bottom to happen.
Eileen: The reason it makes sense, if it worked, is that the technology and practices change so quickly that the policy to regulate will be static and out of date.
Ari: We’ve had 8 years of self regulation, and we’re still having these problems. We’re going to need a backstop legislation. If we can get at a self regulatory model, and back that up, we’ll be much better off.
Mike: We have that already. We have that around email and children’s spaces. But it is a harm based model, and we haven’t come up with a definition of harm. But the industry recognizes that we have a relationship with customers, and we need their trust in order to have a business. That’s why we need a broader initiative than just the NAI.
Q: how do you compete with companies that don’t follow the practices?
Jeff: We see business models where the data is being used without a publisher’s knowledge. But that is a business issue, not a privacy issue.
Q: Does the technology involved change the standards? Does ISP targeting require different policy?
Mike: The same piece of data in the hands can be tracked back differently than if it is in the hands of another company.

We have the technology. We have the platform. We have the audience. The promise of digital technology for marketing is to benefit all links in the value chain. Tracking consumer wants, needs and behaviours will target them with fewer ads that are so relevant as to be more useful than intrusive. Publishers will realize the true value of their context with heartier CPMs that reward target-rich, well-lit environments. And digital media will knit these audience pockets together in networks that offer marketers necessary reach and scale with none of the waste of less accountable platforms. This perfect eco-system of digital media will deliver right-message, right-time, right-place marketing that serves all constituencies. Is marketing utopia just over that next ridge? Or is the “perfect eco-system” actually delivering reduced ad budgets that cannot support current marketing infrastructures or continue to underwrite good content?
MODERATOR:
Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau
SPEAKERS:
Margaret Clerkin, Executive Director, MindShare Invention
Russell Fradin, President, Adify
Gian Fulgoni, Chairman, comScore, Inc.
Eric Wheeler, Chief Executive Officer, 33Across
Dave A. Yovanno, Chief Operating Officer, U.S. Media, ValueClick, Inc.

Q: Is targeting helping or hurting our industry?

A: Are we really delivering targeting the way we claim we do. There’s a lot of room for improvement.

A: ValueClick: Currently, it is hurting the industry. Targeting should bring more dollars into the online market place, but what it is actually doing is allowing advertisers to cherry pick.

A: Mindshare: One of the issues is around who actually owns the data, who is using it, and who is gaining the knowledge. The advertiser is paying for that, but the knowledge is also being gained by the publisher, who is using it to sell to other advertisers to the benefit of the publisher. There are advertisers who believe that the data belongs to them, and should be portable.

A: There are issues around cherry picking, but behavioral targeting allows us to analyze social networks like never before, and it’s the data that marketers have been craving for.

A: Adify: It’s a continuum. Without all the targeting, we probably don’t have an industry like we have. But you can’t just look at the targeting part of the equation. But it is very hard to deliver mass scale of micro targets. For any individual publisher, it is dangerous to get too targeted. If you are trying to target someone who traded a quarterback for a running back on their fantasy football page, you are going too far.

Q: If you look at the world of publishers and marketers, who is really benefiting?

A: comScore: If targeting was working the way we think in terms of accuracy and benefit, I’d think that what advertisers are willing to pay would be much higher than we’re getting. Ad networks should be able to charge much more than a single publisher. Targeting raises two promises to an advertiser. 1) I promise that I’ll deliver the audience that I’m selling you , and 2) I’m getting something significantly better than non targeted advertising. Direct response advertisers have an easier time of measuring that return. That’s much more difficult for brand advertisers.

Q: DR and branding used to be looked at completely separate entities. Are they coming together? Is there a blending?

A: Mindshare: Its definitely blending. No agency has just a single objective. So you need to be strategic about moving both or multiple objectives, and you need to allocate your dollars to do that.

A: 33Across: Being performance based is the only tangible metric that you can feed to the higher-ups that is measureable. Advertisers will pay a premium to have their brand associated with specific content. If their objective is DR, then they can turn to a network.

A: ValueClick: We’re seeing a widening of the gap in CPMs. The premium branded sites can still command a premium CPM, but there is very little going on in the middle. Thanks to social media, there is a driving down of CPMs. We’re seeing clients with their budgets in two or three chunks to spend against different objectives.

Q: Because social media is designed to engage people at extended periods of time, why isn’t it seen as beneficial for branding?

A: The way social media is structured, there is a titanic amount of inventory. It has nothing to do with the page views in social media. When you translate that to a CPM, it becomes miniscule on a pure CPMs. We are awash in low CPM inventory because a lot of social sites have a frequency of 10 million.

A: 33A: that is absolutely right. We’re moving away from marketing to customers to having conversations with them. Its not that social media is bad, its that we’re using the wrong metrics.

A: Mindshare: You can advertise in social media. But you need to find the people that will engage and influence other people.

A: 33A: We built ad systems for scale. How many of the IAB standard sizes are good for having a conversation with an audience.

Q: Are CPMs no longer an effective way to sell online advertising?

A: comScore: No. You don’t expect an immediate response from an ad in a magazine ad. To big brands, the things that are important are how many people am I reaching and am I influence them. If we want people to move money from traditional media to online, we need to give them the proof. If you show them a 2% click-thru rate, that isn’t going to happen.

A: 33A: You need to have some form of currency for people to trade on. For marketers with savvy, that doesn’t really matter. All advertising is held to some action globally, no matter what the pricing model is. In the DR world, there is either a sale or a lead. What is the equivalent in a branding model? That’s a much more complex question than a pricing model.

Q: Are you finding that you are customizing objectives for each individual client?

A: Mindshare: You have to figure out your clients objectives and the action that you want the user to take. You can do performance based deals with large publishers, but we aren’t going to move to one or the other. It isn’t black or white. If your goal is to increase your reach, that is going to be sold on a CPM basis.

A: ValueClick: This is one of the most self-loathing industry, but we’re the fastest growing advertising medium every. And we’re the only ones making money. But there are two kinds of fragmentation that hurts the business. The fragmentation of publishers makes it impossible to plan, so you need aggregation. The other is to date, advertisers have been able to get a return with nearly every new technology or method to do something. The media planners are deluged by all of these options.

A: A:33: Peter Naylor had something interesting to say. When you sell a deal on TV, you get high fives. When you sell a deal online, people say, “You sold that?” and then need to figure out if they can deliver it.

A: Mindshare: There is a lot of attribution given to search that isn’t rightfully there’s. There is a lot of research being conducted right now that is going to dramatically change that.

A: comScore: If you look at the consumer electronics market, you need to look at latent data for 90 days before you will see a conversion and that’s just online. 70% of the conversions happen offline.