The fourth panel looked at advertising and asks “where should the advertising go” but that is almost like asking: who owns the Internet.

The panelists include:

- Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media and Advertising
- Rob Norman, CEO GroupM
- Gloria Scoby, Senior VP Crain Communications
- Tad Smith, Reed Business Information
Staci Kramer was moderating the panel and came out with the question on a lot of people’s minds:

Is the advertising pie growing, shrinking and is there only one pie?

Peter Horan: What is the pie? Individual pieces that make up the marketing pie are shrinking but the total pie is growing.

Gloria Scoby: Crain sees more opportunities for partnerships, so in her opinion it’s cut and dry, the pie is growing.

Tad Smith: Events/Internet are up, print is going down. Interestingly, profit is not growing as media companies are seeing a major shift away from print and simultaneously investing in new media. Since costs remain high, that puts a lot of pressure on profit.

Rob Norman: Definitely growing but he’s “spending other people’s money”. As well, GroupM - while a 13,000 person and $40B agency - is the world’s largest buyer of interactive media (and one of my former clients).

A few interesting soundbites:

Norman comments that “it’s easy to know who owns magazines, but not easy to own the Internet. He’s right. I don’t know who owns the Web but it’s not media companies nor is it tech companies. But those two don’t like to coexist and collaborate because one thinks it’s better than the other and that creates bad partnerships.

Horan brings the focus to search: “Fork in the road was functional search, from question to specific content… we’re not in age of intent-driven media, alongside brand driven media. Today you ask a question and get a series of answers via search.”  He adds: Search has shifted power to search and content owners, away from distributors of content.  That’s true because search engines help consumers skip over the distribution points to a large extent, but portals remain key.

IAC hasn’t done very well in search, so it’s interesting to see the conversation head to search… clearly, search is on everyone’s mind, and seeing search get 40% of the online ad pie and Google command 40% of US advertising revenues, this is a recurring theme.

Smith has a very good point: for all of the talk about targeted [web] media being preferred comes the flip side: “If a Chief Marketing Officer can spend $1M on TV, $1M on print and $1M online, but with online you can see that it has a negative ROI, what do you do? What happens when you realize just how much of a negative ROI some campaigns get online. What will that result in? I don’t know.”

I guess ignorance is bliss. He has a good point, but I’d say how much greater of a negative does print, TV or radio “yield”? Of course, you know the expression, if you’re gonna be in the negative, go big!

Norman shatters the myth that marketers favor auction-based media planning. While I think auctions have a place in media buying (see the fantastic growth and success of Right Media, for example), what he says is true about big marketers: they “like uneven playing fields: Procter & Gamble likes to know that it has the biggest stick in the house and can do what they want with it.”

Ultimately, my two cents are simple: I don’t think web revenues will ever be incremental, they are cannibalistic. I touched on this recently on the launch of Hulu, just yesterday.