Gian Fulgoni may have started his presentation on a bearish note, but he ended it on a bullish one. His main reason for optimism: Online advertising has a profound return on investment that goes well beyond clicks. Fulgoni calls this phenomenon the "latency" effect, and showed data suggesting that the preponderance of online advertising's impact happens "offline," and frequently a lot time after someone was exposed to an online ad or search. In other words: It's a branding medium.

Gian Fulgoni from ComScore showed some interesting stats from research into click-through rates and so-called "view-through" rates and how those rates translate into offline buying and purchase.

"The click had its value," said Gian Fulgioni, co-founder of comScore. "Particularly when we were getting CTRs well above the 1% range. But if we cling to that as a metric of effectiveness now, we're not going to be able to pull the branding dollars online.

comScore chief Gian Fulgoni also got things off on a "bearish" note. "I flew out last night, and I don't think I can remember a stranger weekend, keeping track of what's going on in the financial markets," Fulgoni said, marking the third person to invoke the Bear Stearns implosion in this morning's opening comments.

Cory Treffiletti wonders "what won't Google offer for free in the next year?" Good question.

With the “r” word looming in the background, Carat has revised its global ad spending outlook downward for 2008, taking its total ad spending estimate down to 6.0% for the year, down from its previous outlook of 6.2%. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s not that big a downgrade. And more importantly, it’s being driven mainly by cuts in old guard media like newspapers. Online ad spending will grow 23.3%, according to Carat. That’s down slightly from 27.2% in 2007, but it’s still far from recessionary.

The OMMA Global Hollywood conference theme is "Welcome to the Machine." It's our playful take on the idea that the Web is chewing up everything in its path -- from TV, to radio to magazines and even mobile.

MediaPost Publisher Ken Fadner got things off on a worrisome note this morning invoking the "r" word. "We had a bank fail over the weekend," Fadner started things off with, suggesting that macro economics might be relevant to the online industry's micro economy.

Hard to believe it's already a year since last year's OMMA Hollywood. I'm guest-blogging the show and have a different perspective this time coming at it from an operator's perspective. Ken's talking about the bank failing over the weekend. Shamless plug: Go check out Minyanville.com to get an informed read all day about the Bear Stearns situation. No doubt there will be more talk over the two days about the effect of the economy on online media and marketing.

We're not talking about international advertising -- we changed the name of our OMMA conference to OMMA Global because we try to tackle the various facets of digital marketing. Everything from search (my favorite, of course!), to video and online publishing, to social media, gaming and even mobile.