• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 23, 2012

That was part of OMMA Tablet “Planning” panel moderator Thom Kennon’s warm-up, and it got my attention.

Kennon, who is director of strategy at WPP’S Y&R unit, opened the conversation by asking if the way brands and consumers are interacting through tablets is a “brand new human behavior.”

“I would say no,” Forrester Senior Analyst Melissa Parrish, corrected. “It is a new technology” and adding, “It is a multi-screen experience.”

Mark Silber, Executive Creative Director, at WPP mobile unit Joule, suggested a good way to start was by “not just fighting the last war.”

Noting how the industry historically has started using one new medium, based on the experiences of the last one – you now, treating Web pages like print pages, and TV like radio – he suggested the industry start looking at it from the user’s perspective, and not try to define it by its attributes: “it’s sort of shaped like a PC… and we can use it like a smartphone.”

“Let’s walk through the stages [consumers] are going through in their day, and in the places we expect to reach them,” Silber suggested, adding, “Once you start thinking like that, plus the various form factors of the tablet does, and how people engage with it, you do start to come up with ideas that we did not come up before.”