• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 6, 2011

Lance Loveday, CEO at Closed Loop Marketing, led the group discussion on brand advertising following Thursday morning sessions at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit in Captiva, Fla. Key takeaways include:

1) Advertisers are increasingly trying to correlate soft brand awareness metrics with a hard web metric, e.g. visits.

2) Companies may know they're underspending in Online, but the perceived risk of changing the marketing mix too quickly and being wrong keeps people from taking the action they know is correct.

3) The internal discussions around media mix are changing. There's an increasing appreciation that it isn't a zero-sum game but that different media forms have a synergistic impact on others. The silos are crumbling.

4) Even so, media mix and attribution models are not prescriptive: "Mix model doesn't negate business judgment". Love that.