• by Masha Geller , October 26, 2001

As you may know, MediaPost hosted a conference in New York yesterday. We invited 100 of the best minds in the industry and asked them to come up with some answers. Surprisingly enough, they did. The panelists debated, the audience pitched in and at the end of the day we were left with a prescription for the future:

In the next year, the online advertising landscape will continue to be dominated by the big three - AOL, MSN and Yahoo! More importantly, our panelists thought that most of the ad campaigns running on these few big sites will be branding campaigns.

(Only 18% of online dollars are spent on branding today, and a quick audience poll suggested that number may climb to 30%, so we'll have to wait and see if our panelists' goal is realistic.)

Moreover, branding campaigns will be bought primarily on a CPM basis. Now that we've come full circle from counting impressions, to counting clicks, to counting impressions again, we really need to standardize that an opportunity to see (OTS) an ad is what an impression is.

And let's all agree to use third party ad servers and have all parties monitor online campaigns for the first 72 hours to make sure the impression discrepancies are no more than 10%.

And while the media departments are doing all of the above, the creative folks need to make those impressions as effective as possible using the best possible creative - the possibilities really are endless on the web, and we've only scratched the surface of what we can do.

And if we could make all of the above happen in the next year, we'll be ok. It all sounds so simple, doesn't it?