After a rough fourth quarter â€" where e-commerce had its first down period ever -- retail sales via e-commerce are back, according to Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder, comScore, speaking at the OMMA Global Hollywood event here. The numbers aren’t big â€" but for two months in the row e-commerce grew 2% in both January and February. “We might well have bottomed out,” says Fulgoni. Before the economic collapse, Fulgoni notes Internet-related retail business was outperforming the market as a whole. It also turned down before the overall retail market. But he says retailers are coming back to …

Apparently it's Bob Garfield.

Gian Fulgoni, chairman and cofounder, comScore, opened the OMMA Hollywood conference Monday with a firm assertion that "one fundamental theme we have to get off is that the click is a relevant method of advertising. He said there are many other ways to measure effective advertising. The industry also must begin looking at online marketing that drives offline behavior. Advertisers have not started using the Internet to reach consumers worldwide, but it will come. The economy is driving the shift toward the Internet. Search continues to power along and should lead to online spending.

The "MediaPost Raw" blog post “Can Ads Be Effective On Social Networks?" cited Forrester data that was not based on a sampling of the general population, but from a sample of “people who use social networks at least once a month.”

It's common practice at the conclusion of the media conference for the 4As to announce where next year's event will be. Not this time. GroupM's Marc Goldstein, who presided over the event, said the matter simply has yet to be determined, then shrugged his shoulders when asked why. 4As representative Kipp Cheng echoed that, saying simply no decision has been made. One theory: the 4As may be holding off due to the economy. Attendance was down this year with travel budgets curtailed. And if that continues, perhaps the 4As would consider New York as a site, …

Asked by an attendee to explain why media shops are developing their own “audience aggregation” and advertising trading systems, the “Five Families” panel didn’t shed a lot of clarity as to their motives, but clearly agreed it was an imperative. “Adnetik is a new platform. It’s a new project. It’s something new, but I see it as a central part of our group,” explained MPG chief Maria Luisa Francoli. “For many reasons. For one, it will be a real trading platform, that will be dealing with a significant number of dollars. The second reason is it is a learning …

In New Orleans, there's a popular saying: "Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler (Let the Good Times Roll)." MPG's global CEO Maria Luisa Francoli said, however, that's no longer the case in the agency business. "We have been a very comfortable industry,” she said. Yes, we have worked hard for 50 years, she said, but there's been an element of coasting along -- with revenues rising yearly for the most part and clients generally happy. "This has changed, we're a little fat now … and this recession is the final call (to arms) and should (prompt)" the business to …

GroupM’s Irwin Gotlieb sometimes looks like he’s in bed with the media, and it certainly seems that way by his empathetic comments about media sellers at this year’s conference, but the truth is that he actually sees it as being in the long-term best interest of advertisers and agencies. “I’m going to start about the premise of an ecosystem,” Gotlieb explained. “We have an ecosystem One of the things that really troubles me today is that there are media owners that are going out of business. That’s not favorable to us, because it alters the supply and demand for …