• ZDNet, Wednesday, November 8, 2006 11:30 AM

With Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president of sales, in court all week and the promised "go-to-guide" to interactive media from the Advertising Research Foundation still in production, the Ad:Tech panel that was supposed to launch the Internet's next growth wave was a bust. It was full of sweeping pronouncements like "the media will be the Internet," which we're sure has been said at every Ad:Tech since 1999. Hardly trendsetting stuff.

But there were moments of insight, too. Tom Lynch, the vice president of marketing for ING, stated that his company wants to see ad agencies using the Internet as the "leading medium" in planning its media decisions, although not necessarily from a "spend" perspective. He said audiences are now segments, no longer a "mass"--which means you need to reach each through an engaging narrative. This means marketers and agencies have to work harder, but the results will ostensibly bear more fruit. Web technology is not only useful for measuring the impact of campaigns--it also provides a continuous forum for feedback.

Read the whole story at ZDNet »