Main Stage Agenda

 Emcee Cory Treffiletti sets the context for the third edition of OMMA Global Hollywood.

Online advertising growth expectations are being trimmed. Offline media are imploding. Video is causing upheaval among television advertisers and content owners/producers. Social media sites and tools are gaining ubiquity while still searching for revenue. Mobile looms as the access device of the future. Meanwhile, new ad formats and technologies are introduced every week. How can you keep up with the constant torrent of change? Which trends are real and which hyped? Get an objective look at where we are and where we are headed, sector by sector, in this must-see kick-off session.

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 Offline, the news about the economy seems to go from bad to worse. Online, the news hasn’t been great either. Researcher IDC recently made headlines forecasting that online spending would contract this year for the first time since the dot com bubble burst in 2001. How can estimates have suddenly turned so bearish for an industry that grew by as much as 26% in 2007? Is the online sector really in dire straits, or are industry watchers getting caught up in the negativity pervading the greater economy? We’ve asked Paul Kedrosky, noted economist, Web analyst and editor of Infectious Greed, one of the best known economics blogs on the Internet, to size up the situation for 2009. 

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Advertising rises and falls in exaggerated swings around the general economy trendline. With the U.S. and World in recession, the global advertising industry is falling fast. Can online continue to grow in this environment? Will a worsening economic and general advertising climate hasten the shift towards the Web, or will online flatten too? And what about future growth? Is it enough to say, ’If the Web is where people are spending their time, then the Web will be where marketers will spend their money’? Can we say that today about services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter? What happens as search and performance-based media start to plateau? What will step in as the online sector’s growth drivers? 

In the early 2000s, profitless Web startups went public to enormous valuations, only for that bubble to burst, ushering in a two-year recession. Since, IPOs have remained a closed avenue to Web entrepreneurs and investors seeking exits, but the mergers and acquisitions market—thanks to stiff competition between Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and others—has been a more than adequate substitute. However, in the present climate the Web giants are cutting back on acquisitions and VCs are closing their purse strings, forcing startups to hunker down and ride out the recession. Is now an impossible time to seek new funding? What, today, constitutes a healthy startup? Which sectors and what companies are best positioned to survive?

Online ad spending has been growing at a healthy clip since 2001, and while brand marketers have certainly benefited from the measurability, interactivity and innovative new technologies of the whole online medium, search has been the real growth story. Now, in these trying economic times, marketers are relying more than ever on search and performance-based advertising to deliver new customers, but growth rates are flattening out. Does this mean that search is approaching some kind of ceiling? Can search providers get people to search more than they already do? Can innovations in SEM drive new growth? And where do Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies fit in? Mahalo Founder and CEO Jason Calacanis tells us how Internet advertising’s most dynamic sector will navigate choppy waters.

There’s no question about it: the rocky economic climate is causing search and performance-based advertising to increase share of online advertising. As their budgets get squeezed, marketers are shying away from less measurable display and branding campaigns, shifting even more dollars to direct response ads that can be counted as a cost of sales. According to a recent J.P. Morgan report, performance-based search ads are expected to increase 10 percent in 2009 to nearly $16 billion, while graphical ads, both performance-based and branded, will languish. How much longer can that kind of growth continue, and how will pricing be affected? How does the flight to search and performance-based media affect marketers? What challenges does it present for agencies? 

From the 400-plus ad networks that exist today to the new audience aggregation ventures launched by the likes of Havas Digital and Publicis’ VivaKi, it’s clear that a new science of advertising is overtaking the way ads are bought and sold. Upwards of 40% of publishers’ inventory is now sold on the secondary market, up from just 5% three years ago. Meanwhile, agencies are starting to aggregate audiences into networks, too—actually decoupling them from the content they’re viewing. Both trends enable the scientific tracking of consumers as they navigate across cyberspace. What happens to publishers now that ad networks and agencies are shifting their focus to audiences rather than content? Will the trend spark a resurgence in brand advertising on the Internet, or will it ultimately push branding further behind direct response?

The industry’s leading developers – Google, Microsoft, Canoe, Spot Runner and Nielsen – will discuss how they are creating systems to better target, buy, manage and analyze the audiences of video regardless of where it is served, and how that will change both the consumer viewing experience and the advertising marketplace in the process. Will these systems finally crumble the walls dividing the video gardens of TV and online, creating a seamless marketplace in which advertisers and agencies can look at and buy video advertising across platforms? Will the enhanced targeting, diagnostics, addressability, increase the premium value of video ads, or will it move video into a more performance-oriented medium? How are agencies and advertisers adapting their own organizations and cultures to prepare for the biggest onslaught of video fragmentation since cable’s multichannel universe collided with the broadcast networks.

Mention the term "conversational marketing to John Battelle and you can’t get him to stop talking. The Search guru and founder of Federated Media, a next-generation media and publishing company, popularized the term "conversational marketing" two years ago in a series of blog posts about the future of social media and marketing. Conversational marketing can take many forms, almost all of which directly involve advertisers, content producers and users creating an integrated experience together. As content providers move away from “packaged goods media” towards a more author and consumer-driven approach, many believe that conversational marketing will emerge as the primary revenue stream. But what, in scope, does conversational marketing refer to? Is it scalable? Can it save struggling Web 2.0 firms that have yet to find a business model? What are the near-term and long-term opportunities for advertisers?

Some media futurists argue that all media will eventually be social. That prophecy has yet to pan out, but instead of sitting on the fence waiting for the next Google to sort out the social media business model, media and marketing services firms are taking a much more proactive approach. As moderator and MediaPost writer Joe Marchese noted in a recent column, everyone from PR firms, to brand consultants, vendors, ad agencies large and small, even clients themselves, are hedging their bets against such a future by building their own infrastructure for handling social media data and communications. Surely, there isn’t enough room for everyone. So, who is best positioned to become social media’s "agency of record?" What kinds of services would such a company provide?
 

The emergence of mobile applications and the rapid rise of the mobile Web are giving brands and marketers a much broader platform on which to build direct relationships with consumers. The next generation of phones change the way people relate to one another and to information. Shouldn’t they also change the way brands relate to consumers? As millions of people now start to do by phone what they did online (messaging, search, media use) are just more banner ads and pre-rolls really the best way to leverage this opportunity? This panel of leading-edge mobile marketers will explore how mobile can and will change the way brands interact with consumers, how they must learn to talk "with" not "at" the user. Brands have to add value and utility to consumers’ everyday experience. They have to stop vying for attention and start understanding where the target is, what they need and what kind of conversation they want to have with the brand.