• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 5, 2009

Perhaps optimistically, some publishing and agency executives are predicting the ad marketplace will begin rebounding by the second quarter of this year.

"We feel the second half will start to feel a lot better," said Jim Spanfeller, president and CEO of Forbes.com, during a discussion panel hosted Thursday by ad technology firm the Rubicon Project.

Andrea Kerr Redniss, SVP and managing director NewCast@Optimedia, Optimedia US, was slightly less hopeful. "Probably around mid-second quarter, we'll start to see the bottom," she said. "But, I don't think this is going to be the ad recession to end all ad recessions."

Neither, however, attempted to downplay the current state of the market.

"It's pretty bad," said Spanfeller, who has partly overseen more than 60 layoffs at Forbes since November, along with the closing of ForbesAutos.com and the shrinking of ForbesTraveler.

Added Redniss: "We're going to go through a deep, dark period."

Panelists, including Redniss, also pointed to the many opportunities presented by the increasingly dismal ad market.

"I think this could be the real inflection point when digital really starts to take hold," said Tim Hanlon, EVP and Managing Director, Publicis' new media unit VivaKi Ventures. "This is the perfect time" to push the digital envelope "because the risk is so low."

For his part, David Honig, co-founder of social-centric ad platform Media6Degrees, said he couldn't be happier with the present state of affairs. "This is the greatest time to be in business," he said, alluding to the opportunities created by a shifting industry.

Notably, rather than saving money with third-party ad networks, VivaKi's Hanlon predicted that agencies and marketers will increasingly elect to cut out such middlemen. "It's incumbent upon agencies and marketers to take the control," Hanlon said.

To do so, however, Hanlon made it clear that agencies have to increasingly invest in data-focused engineering-mind talent rather than "liberal arts poet-types."

A liberal arts major himself, Spanfeller at Forbes partly disagreed. "At the end of the day, agencies are about big ideas," he said. "I worry when it becomes too much about data churning."