Brand should be treated as just another attribute along with pricing, convenience, and others, according to Peter Fader, professor of marketing at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania. He added that brand gets "put on a pedestal" it doesn't deserve. Loren Grossman, chief strategy officer for Rapp digital, disagreed, saying brand encompasses all the other targeting attributes and so should warrants greater consideration. Dave Helmreich, vice president, Interactive Marketing, TARGUSinfo, sparked the discussion by explaining that measuring brand was actually pretty easy, simply requiring looking at products and services people use offline to target them online. That method …

Who should sit in meetings with advertiser? Publisher, angency, ad networks? Corinna Calhoun, Sr., director of Ad Networks at Microsoft says brands should come to Microsoft with agencies, and "then we can bring to bear all technology offerings we have." Baker of DataXu says agencies may come to play more of a consulting role and technology will do all the grunt work. Undertone's Cassiday says marketers more and more want to hear directly from vendors (like Undertone), suggesting technology provider should have more of an upfront role in campaign planning.

Mike Cassidy, President & CEO of ad network Undertone Networks has a warning for publishers with ad network aspirations: “You’re going to lose your core competency, which is selling premium inventory,” he says. That said, Cassidy understands that publishers are having a tough time of it these, and that their desire to brand out is understandable. “I think publishers are suffering.” He adds, “Brands matter, audiences matter, it all matters … We all have to find out who is our customer.” Saying himself “I’m don’t think any ad network is a must buy,” Cassidy says mistakes like placing ads …

Mike Cassidy, president & CEO of Undertone Networks said the ad network industry is plagued by the perception that everyone is making tons of money. You see people on panels like this and you think they're billion dollar companies and then find out "its only three guys in a garage living on food stamps." So of the 400 ad networks out there, how many are living on food stamps? Cassidy's remarks probably won't win much sympathy from publishers who often focus on the fat margins big ad networks make via arbitrage.

In an agency panel focusing on simplifiying the stack, Joanna O’Connell, Manager of Strategic Development, ATOM Systems at Razorfish, says the company tries to help simplify agencies understanding of the different components that go into building a campaign by telling them that they're partnering with "best-of-breed" technology partners, and they can take that assurance back to their clients. So, basically, it sounds like Atom is saying "trust us, we know what" we're doing?" Is that sufficient for most agencies, or do they want to know more about how agencies' new demand platforms work?

“Real-time matters a lot,” Scott Spencer, Group Product Manager at Google, said with regard to yield optimization. Unlike search and other areas, the parameters that determine what you want to buy change continuously, says Spencer. Being able to look at every parameter and know in real-time what is the best buy for any given advertiser, he adds. What is the most critical data that matters to advertisers? There’s no real standard answer,” says Spencer. “Data means differs thing to different people … Sometimes geo matters; sometimes time-of-day matters…” Looking more broadly at the industry, the mega trend of …

One question underlying the promise Spencer lays out for Google to bring the same efficiency to display advertising that it did to search is whether one company--Google--should play such a big role in both sides of the ad business. Should there essentially be ne big network dominating search and display, even its more efficient than the current landscape fragmented across 400 ad networks?

Tracking consumers’ online behavior is like dating, says Cathy Dwyer, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Computer Science and Information Systems at Pace University, in so many words. As with the courting process, too aggressive an approach -- “Hello, How are you, Let me track you” -- is likely to scare away your, er, target. “That is not the way to do it,” she says. Rather, marketers need to ask themselves, “How do you engage consumers in a deeper way?” The key is to take it slow, and keep it honest by maintaining total transparency. At least according to Dwyer, most consumers …

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