• by Ross Fadner , November 4, 2003

From a blow-by-blow perspective, no knockouts were thrown during Tuesday's Ramsey vs. Tchong, but MediaDailyNews would have to give the title of this bout to Ramsey by decision. The eMarketer CEO took a more practical, numbers- supported approach to his Web prognostications, making for a more credible prediction, though Tchong remained a strong contender with bolder predictions and for adding some controversy and energizing what might otherwise have been a staid industry event.

In fact, Ad:Tech's Tuesday morning session ultimately was decided upon by the audience, who voted at the end of each of the nine rounds via mobile phone SMS technology.

When the topic of broadband penetration was brought to a vote, a third of the audience felt that broadband had to reach 50% of all households before it could be considered a critical mass.

Talk of cell phones prompted Ramsey to leave the audience with a rhetorical, "Do most of us really want to be interrupted on our cell phones with advertising messages?" Tchong replied that the integration of mobile phones into marketing schemes is inevitable, particularly because they are becoming so multimedia-faceted. "More camera phones, 25 million, were sold in the first half of '03 than digital cameras. This is a remarkable revolution," he said.

On the topic of rich media, Ramsey showed its growth from 2% of all ad impressions in 2001 to 8% of all ad impressions in 2003. He quoted Nate Elliott of Jupiter Research: "Rich media will account for 25% of all online advertising by 2008," saying that this number was in fact too low. While Tchong didn't necessarily contend the notion of rich media's importance or its proposed growth, he did say that the bottom line with advertising's effectiveness is the quality of the message and not the size of the file.

Seventy-four per cent of the audience believes that deployment of rich media- enabled advertising will increase over the next year; 25% believed it would stay the same.

More eMarketer research revealed that of the 139 million Americans who have online access, 101 million (73% of all Internet users) have used the Internet for shopping information, while 81.2 million have actually made purchases. Ramsey proclaimed that, "the Internet can build on every facet of the buying process; it excels in information gathering, which is one of the reasons why search is so popular."

eMarketer's 2003 online holiday shopping prediction was for a 29% increase over 2002's $13.8 billion in retail revenue, at $17.8 billion for the pending season. Sixty percent of the audience said they would do thirty per cent or more of their holiday shopping online.

Tchong declared that eBay would be the holiday revenue-generating frontrunner, citing their 82 million regular users to be a larger population than Egypt, the 15th biggest country in the world. In fact, of the monster Internet brands, AOL, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and amazon.com, the majority of the audience (58 %) found eBay's interactive business model to be the most powerful, followed by Google at 26 %. Ramsey made mention of eBay as the Internet's number 1 shopping destination and incidental largest used car seller in the world, generating $6.7 billion.