Are too many conference discussions dancing around the salient issue of individual relevance? Maybe.

Jason Temming assocate director at Starcom said there was obvious synergy for Gillette at  Sports Illustrated when it comes to reaching men, 18-24 who  control their media. "That's why mash-up technology was such a great fit." Stacey Vollman, general manager at  SI.com said that the concept of mash-up also mean application in a controlled fashion, since there was a lot of potential for the kinds of user-content that Gillette would not want to be associated with, eg, profanity.  "We controlled the original content," said Vollman, "But let users create their content, through in-house design teams that developed the interface." …

Are too many conference discussions dancing around the salient issue of individual relevance? Maybe. A key to making social networking, content and advertising work on interactive platforms is relevance. That’s relevance as in having significant value to individual consumer. That notion seems foreign to many advertisers and agencies, content producers and distributors, who continue to view their Web audiences as a collective "we." By and large, how they use the Web is still all about them and their corporate agenda, or what they perceive to be the interests and needs of consumer categories. The keep to securing and sustaining user …

I'd expected the Friday morning OMMA ad-track panel to be packed. With men. Why? it's about Gillette's interactive campaign on Sports Illustrated's SI.com, centered on, you guessed it, the Swimsuit Issue, the only issue I care about. Unless there's a boxing story. Well it was mostly men, but not packed. What was I missing? A panel on social media versus porn?

Social media are the bane of my existence, says Chris Curtin, vp digital strategy, H-P. "It has greatest promise for us but has to be thought through and not just the ultimate PSS of your campaign." Bob Stohrer, CMO of Virgin Mobile USA, had more questions than answers because, as he says, you have to come at social media from all angles. The "Strip to Clothe" campaign few weeks ago, donating to homeless youth, took off on its own, but was shut down two weeks into it. "Most such campaigns depend on flanking media." No easy answers, everyone …

What’s working? ‘Slime,’ for Pam Kaufman, Chief Marketing Officer, Nickelodeon. … Referring to a highly experiential campaign that Nick is doing. For Lars Bastholm, Executive Creative Director, AKQA, it’s a campaign AKQA did by the name of Nike Mobile ID, which apparently won some sort of award last night (wink, wink). For Bob Stohrer, Chief Marketing Officer, Virgin Mobile USA, it was a call-in ‘help line’ campaign, which encouraged interaction. (Stohrer then likened microsites to the proverbial/token T-shirt that you (the marketer) get at the end of a marketing campaign, i.e., a trivial gesture.) For Chris Curtin, …

Where's the "agency" talent? Bob Stohrer, Chief Marketing Officer, Virgin Mobile USA thinks that as long as anyone or any agency holds onto ‘that’ concept of advertising, it's problematic.

Right now, the OMMA attendees are hearing from some brand marketers, and what they have to say about the idea of managing digital resources? Chris Curtin, Vice President, Digital Strategy, Hewlett-Packard Company, is responsible for channel-shifting dollars from traditional to digital, and tries to encourage his company to define creativity as broadly as possible “Today, it flows into all part of the business,” said Curtin. “It’s the types of deals you do, the people you hire -- Creativity is more of a horizontal concept.” … Rather than a vertical concept, of course.