Where does social media fit into the online ad landscape, and how do marketers determine ROI when it comes to attracting Likes and followers? A panel of mostly agency types including MEC, Deep Focus and Big Fuel executives placed social media somewhere between display and search. That's because it combines the direct response, transactional model of search with the targeting by social actions that's more in line with traditional display ads. "You're trying to drive direct action but based on all these layers of social targeting rather than intent," noted MEC managing partner Adam Schlachter. Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer …

The big debate on the big "Gorilla" (you know, Facebook) panel at OMMA Display is what the difference is between conventional online display and Facebook's version of it.

Gridley said social media and mobile are the two ad areas "on steroids" in terms of growth and represent tremendous opportunities in relation to measurement solutions. More than half of mobile campaigns, for instance, don't have any measurement, opening the door to emerging technologies for tracking ad effectiveness in the medium. Cross-channel measurement is another area ripe for innovation because all media and device are now Internet-enabled. For companies coming up with metrics offerings, scale and showing successful case studies are key to gaining credibility with potential buyers.

Leading off the afternoon sessions, Linda Gridley, President and CEO of Gridley & Co. highlighted the critical role M&A has played in shaping the growth of online measurement between 2000 and 2008, as offline companies bought online ones, proprietary data sets became sought after and mobile measurement capability became increasingly important. Demand for companies providing real time measurement have also helped to drive M&A activity. Over the next 12 months she predicts more M&A activity in the area of digital measurement. The biggest acquirers are likely to include the likes of comScore, Nielsen, IBM and Adobe, among others.

The only thing expanding quicker than the number of players in the overly complex online display ad technology space, is the number of players attempting to simplify it. Ben Fox, executive vice president of Magnify Platform Services is the second presenter at OMMA Display today that is trying to simplify Terrence Kawaja's LUMAscapes chart.

Horizon Media digital media activation guru Mary Shirley more or less simplified the whole panel discussion debate taking place at OMMA Display, asked by moderator Colin Gillis - senior technology analyst and director of research at BGC Partners - "who benefits the most" from the current ad technology "stack," Horizon's Shirley, quipped, "The DSP's right?"

Driven mainly by video, mobile data traffic is on pace to increase tenfold over the next five years, telecom technology provider Ericsson predicts.

According to online ad guru Jim Meskauskas, you probably don’t care that much about it. Speaking on a panel at OMMA Display, Meskauskas, who is Co-Founder, MediaDarwin, suggested that people in the online ad world may be deluding themselves to think that people are likely to engage with online display ads in a deeper and more meaningful way.

Peter Minnium, Head of Digital Brand Initiatives, IAB, got the next OMMA Display panel off to a start by asking the audience for a show of hands to see who is "happy" with the ad experience they have when they look at pages online.

Joanna O'Connell, Senior Analyst at Forrester is demystifying the display ad technology marketplace for OMMA Display attendees, and she just showed her own, far more simplified version of Terrence Kawaja's infamous LUMAscapes chart. It has fewer columns and rows and bubbles, but O'Connell admitted, it's still, "just a mess."