• by Peter Gardiner , April 15, 2008

VENICE--If there was a theme to the first morning of the Venice Festival of Media, it was "openness." Katherine Pope, president of NBC Universal Television Studios, echoed it when she noted the network has been pushing for the last year, most strongly from entertainment chief Ben Silverman, to open the program development process to the advertising community. NBC wants to create a much more robust connection between brands and content. It's a welcomed approach from a network striving for business momentum.

The open theme was carried through by Mike Murphy, Facebook's vice president of media sales, who stressed the social network's open application approach. It not only benefits users with more than 20,000 applications, but also helps to bring the "garage" developers into the Facebook ecosystem.

But the elephant in the room for both speakers and their companies was monetization. Will NBC's open approach bring in much-needed revenue growth? Does Facebook have the right strategy to drive massive revenue from its 70 million users?

Notably, the session used some interesting technology from Synovate to kick-start the dialogue between the audience and the speakers. That's a pleasant change from the "pass the mike" approach of most conferences.

It was also a bit striking that the content in the morning seemed very U.S.-centric, given the decidedly global feel in audience makeup and, of course, the Venetian locale.