• Wall Street Journal, Thursday, October 11, 2007 12:15 PM

We are knee-deep in the digital revolution, yet marketers are still having trouble making the transition. A new study from consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in conjunction with the upcoming Association of National Advertisers conference reveals that interactive marketing still lags badly behind consumer behavior. The Web has become an essential part of most consumers' lives--eight in ten Americans are online, and usage is nearly parallel to that of television, yet marketers on average allocate just 5-10 percent of their ad budgets to digital media. Moreover, less than 25 percent of the 184 marketers polled for the study said they were "digitally savvy."

Indeed, online spending is still very much driven by search--a sector where you wouldn't see national brand advertisers spending an awful lot of their budget. Most of that usually goes to TV, the biggest branding medium. So why aren't those brand dollars moving faster to the Web? That's one of the big questions to be addressed at the ANA conference, along with an assessment of the best ways for national brand advertisers to market online.

If conference attendance figures are anything to go by, the mostly traditional media-skewing audience is a thirsty bunch. Attendance is up 25 percent this year to 1,200, making it the first time the conference has sold out since it started 97 years ago, according to ANA CEO Bob Liodice.

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