• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 7, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO--Though the proliferation of blogs and niche Web sites have made the media world increasingly fragmented, advertisers are not about to give up trying to reach consumers through media, said panelists Monday at OMMA West here.

"As long as clients have budgets, advertising will survive," said Dave Smith, CEO of Mediasmith. And, he added, mass audiences will continue to exist in some form, whether to watch the Super Bowl or view the unfolding of a major news event.

At the same time, predicted Smith and other industry executives, "individual" media--including blogs and podcasting--will continue to grow, raising the question of how to reach an audience spread thin.

Joining Smith in the panel discussion about re-aggregating media online were R.J. Hilgers, group account director at Avenue A/Razorfish West, Nick Pahade, executive vice president and managing director at Beyond Interactive, Dorian Sweet, vice president of creative at Agency.com, Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe Media. The panel was moderated by Joe Mandese, MediaPost's editor in chief.

Tobaccowala predicted that the dispersement of the mass audience means that advertisers will have to pay significantly more to capture people's attention.

And, he said, any effort at re-aggregation won't lead to putting together a mass audience as much as putting together certain groups. "We're moving from a one-to-many model to a one-to-some model," he said. "One of the fundamental things with aggregation is deciding who you want to leave out."

Panelists also discussed marketers' expectations that online ads provide accountability. Sweet said some marketers were now overemphasizing metrics--which "should be the training wheels" to help traditional marketers get comfortable with the Internet, rather than a "ball and chain."

But Tobaccowala proposed that marketers might not rely on measurement metrics as much as it seems. "Everybody chooses with their hearts," he said, adding that they then use the numbers to justify their decisions.