• by Douglas Quenqua , September 28, 2007

What does it take to be a leader in interactive advertising these days? Good question--and one that did not necessarily get answered during Thursday's AOL-sponsored Advertising Week discussion on the topic. But one thing was apparent: Buying up as many digital ad properties as possible isn't a bad start.

It's not a surprising conclusion, given the featured speakers. There was Matt Straznitskas, a senior partner at Mediaedge:cia, whose parent company, WPP, in May agreed to buy 24/7 Real Media for $650 million. And Kathleen Kayse, executive vice president of sales and partnership alliances at AOL Media Network, was there to tout the rollout of her company's Platform A, an offering made possible by some high-profile acquisitions of its own. Also present was David Cohen--executive vice president and director of digital communications at Universal McCann--whose parent company, The Interpublic Group, has made a few smaller deals in the search space.

Kayse boasted that Platform A, an integrated ad-buying platform and network that would give marketers access to 90% of the U.S. online audience and 4.5 billion impressions a day, was made possible by "prescient" AOL acquisitions like third-party display network Advertising.com, behavioral targeting company TACODA and mobile network operator Third Screen Media.

Straznitskas said the 24/7 Real Media purchase had brought "immediate benefit" to WPP by making it technologically competitive. "We had been agnostic in technology," he said, adding: "It's paid dividends in terms of search."

"Yeah, but $650 million can buy a lot of programmers," quipped Cohen, a point that Straznitskas was quick to concede.

But the idea that acquisitions are the path to digital dominance didn't extend to the unrepresented Google. Indeed, the panelists expressed concern over the privacy issues raised by the search giant's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick. "The potential is there for nefarious stuff," maintained Cohen. "Concern over what could happen with all that information is warranted."

The panelists also concurred that Google was spreading itself too thin with its increasing stable of digital offerings.

"You can't do 25 things well," said Cohen. Straznitskas added that from the agency side, there is little appetite for working with Google on many of its new ventures, and that media buyers were waiting to see what would work and what would disappear.

Also discussed was the future of the Internet as a branding tool rather than a direct-response vehicle. The challenge there, offered one panelist, is that marketers know they can measure their efforts on the Web as opposed to other media, so convincing those marketers to spend branding dollars on the one measurable platform will prove difficult.

"The good news about the Internet is that you can measure it," said Kayse. "The bad news about the Internet is that you can measure it."