• by June 6, 2005

Day One: MediaPost's OMMA-West Conference and Expo is off and running in sunny, breezy San Francisco. In case you hadn't heard, OMMA stands for online media, marketing and advertising and it's an acronym we at MediaPost have coined for our conference and trade show and for OMMA magazine, one of two monthly magazines we publish.

Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer, kicked off the conference program today by putting a question to the audience that will frame the two-day conference: "How do you aggregate thousands of disparate Web sites into a media whole? I have no idea, but I'm hoping over we'll learn over the next two days."

In posing the question, Ramsey framed a key theme of the conference: Is the Internet about dis-integration or re-aggregation? Is the Internet contributing to the acceleration of media fragmentation, or is it increasingly moving us toward re-aggregation a la Yahoo!, Google, and eBay?

Ramsey also highlighted five online media and marketing trends. Consumer skepticism and resistance to advertising has never been higher; increasingly, consumers are in control; marketers are being held to a new level of accountability; mass reach efforts are increasingly being supplanted by targeted, niche efforts; and media fragmentation is out of control.

Ramsey, known for his arsenal of tables, charts, and online spending projections, didn't disappoint. His company, eMarketer, projects that online spending will represent 5.4 percent of all media spending in 2005; it projects that $20 billion in media spending will be online by 2008. Currently, eMarketer says 41 percent of all online spending comes from search and search-related media. Broadband, eMarketer says, will be in 36 percent of all households by year-end, 2005. By 2007, 60 million households will have broadband service. Ramsey believes that 60 million represents a tipping point.

Those are just a few data points.

Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer, Publicis Groupe Media and president of SMG Next, keynoted the day's program with an ominous talk, "What Could Destroy Us."

Tobaccowala says business is back, confidence is back, stock prices are up, and "everyone's mood is up and you don't need drugs for it." And yet, he says, the media industry faces some very serious issues.

The first he dubs the "inner-dinosaur disease," or "change sucks." It sucks for marketers, agencies, vendors, anyone. "I hate change, and the reality is that most people hate change." (Interestingly, Tobaccowala has stayed with the same company for more than 20 years, so he knows from what he speaks). He says there are many reasons why companies don't like change and reasons why they drag their feet. They blame obligations to Wall Street and earnings expectations; they blame employees, clients, and bosses; and previous bad experiences with change. Overall, most companies are followers - it's easier to follow someone else, say, Procter & Gamble, which last year embarked on a company-wide communications planning approach to media. Most companies figure they'll see what happens with P&G's approach before they undertake change on their own.

Companies also optimize the wrong thing, according to Tobaccowala. "Everyone talks about the inputs. In the media business, you get about five cents on the dollar of what the client spends. People fixate on the five cents, but not on the 95 cents." That's wrong-headed.

We are addicted to simplistic, one-dimensional outcomes. Says Tobaccowala: "There are huge data challenges and often what happens is that we don't have access to the right numbers because no one asks 'are these numbers actually valid, do they measure what I'm trying to measure, and are they interoperable?'"

Media buyers have become like traders and planners are the asset allocators, he says. "It's not about how to buy, but what to buy." Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group, Tobaccowala says, shifted from a buying-driven agency perspective to a planning perspective nearly nine years ago. "Now we have a new challenge, how do you architect the buy?"

One of the dangers in the media world that companies and agencies must guard against is what he dubs the "Napoleon complex," or a feeling that "media will take over everything. Digital will take over everything. Search will take over everything." It's not so. Jumping from one hot flavor to the next doesn't make good business sense. Competitors mustn't be underestimated, and partnerships can be key.

While the best creative and media minds will probably never work for one another, there are ways to partner. "Without good creative, good ideas, and imagination, you really don't have much," Publicis' seer says. Amen.