Arianna Huffington has often said, "The only way Web sites can get people to pay money for their content is in the cases of financial news or really kinky porn," according to Greg Coleman, President and Chief Revenue Officer, The Huffington Post.

Who do you trust? It used to be Friends and Family people said they trusted the most when asked, with about 99 percent saying they trust the most, says Joshua Spanier, Director, Communications Strategy, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. And the rest of the list, in order would look something like this. Friends and Family CorporationsPoliticians Lawyers But now with all the noise of social media people are saying that they are trusting their friends less and less. They look at their friends on Facebook, says Spanier, and say, "I don't really …

Social media doesn’t require a whole new kind of advertising -- nor would such an approach work, according to Joe Marchese, of Socialvibe. In part, that’s because it’s unrealistic to think that there’s a way to somehow make advertising that doesn’t instantly reveal itself as advertising: “Don’t bastardize your message by trying to match itâ€� to particular content, which becomes an endless rabbit hole of tailoring and tweaking, and praying for unlikely viral successes, because when all is said and done, “no matter how great or funny or creative it is, nobody wants to look at your ad -- unless …

Telling the OMMA Global audience about ChatRoulette, the online recreational service that randomly pairs people up for video chats, Razorfish/Digitas/DeNuo CEO Laura Lang “Not sure what we as marketers do with that, but it’s fun.â€� A lot of people probably share her ambivalence, but not one company -- French Connection U.K., which reccently unveiled a U.K. promotion offering a $375 gift certificate to whoever could go on ChatRoulette and seduce a stranger. This edgy promotion could turn out as a big success or a big shambles, depending on a couple issues, like if anyone gets murdered, if the seducees are upset about being …

Technology historically pushed people away from each other, isolated them, allowed them to work independently, Laura Lang, CEO, Razorfish/Digitas Group, told attendees during the afternoon OMMA Global keynote on Wednesday in San Francisco. Today, technology gives us the ability to connect. So when you hear the words social and media, it's important to remember the pathway it creates, an emotional connection from the brand to the consumer. Lang says marketers who thinks of social media as another channel for advertising are already out of the game. Think about this: 25% of the top links in a search query returns …

The best-made games begin to approximate reality, and at a certain level of refinement and precision, they can actually be used to predict the future, according to Matt Story of Denuo. In a gaming promotion tied into Pontiac’s sponsorship of last year’s NCAA tournament, Denuo partnered with 2K to aggregate the results of many hundreds of video game basketball matches to predict the outcome of matches in the real world. In a testimony to the accuracy of virtual player and team profiles, the predictions forecast the winner 75% of the time.

Consoles will probably dominate the hardcore gaming experience for the foreseeable future, but they present problems for advertisers, especially in terms of scalability, as the different console makers are reluctant to cooperate in ad networks, according to the panelists at OMMA Global’s in-game advertising track. Matt Story, a director at Denuo, pointed to online, console-agnostic games on the Web as an easier, more attractive proposition, offering ubiquity, scalability, and receptivity:  “It’s in your social networks, it’s on your phone, it’s everywhere.  From a creative standpoint, it allows us to always have a message on.â€� Here the gamers “are in a …