Boob Tube vs. YouTube

The Monday afternoon panel “ARF Session: Online Advertising Industry’s Definitive Advertising Playbook,” moderated by the ever-engaging Taddy Hall, took a little time to get going, but the audience participation (thanks, Doron Wesly) spiced things up. Doron pressed to find out why panelists weren’t doing more to take advantage of online advertising, and then another audience member popped a lot of the air out of the collective balloon dismissing the online experience as nowhere near as compelling as TV.

This leads to a number of issues which will be the subject of many Ad:Techs to come, a couple of which were addressed during the panel:
* Beyond simply throwing out the words “rich media,” how can the online ad experience deliver something as powerful as television for the viewer?
* Will this still hold true as TV usage becomes more centralized, with TV content and ads being viewed online, on mobile devices, and in any other channel imaginable?
* Will faster, more reliable broadband provide the bandwidth, crisper monitors, better video cards, and other tech fixes do their part to make the online ad experience better?

Tom Lynch of ING did a great job diving into some of these issues in his responses. He noted that ING’s CEO will get a call from someone on the sales team who says, “I was watching golf with my wife and friends this weekend and saw the ING ad, and it was AWESOME.” Tom said no one says that about the web. His best solution is to drown the higher-ups with data to prove how well online advertising works. The next step is to kill em with data - though the emotional component’s still needed.