Elanso

By Tim O'Reilly

I've been asked to moderate a session called "Tomorrow's Ads" at the World Economic Forum in Davos later this week. It a panel made up of folks from ad agencies, satellite television, publishing, and internet infrastructure (and surprisingly, not really anyone from what I'd consider a next generation ad platform, despite the presence of many such people here in Davos. However, there are many such folks in the audience, and I'm hoping to bring them into the discussion.) Here are some of the questions that I've been wanting to ask the panel, off the top of my head. I'd love your suggestions for more.

1. Imran Khan of JP Morgan already estimates global internet ad spending for 2007 at about $30 billion (and even that seems like it might be rather low given that Google and Yahoo alone ad up to about $22 Billion in revenue.) But according to his figures (sorry, no link available--I have only a paper copy), the internet's share of global ad revenue appears to be only about 5.3% worldwide, and 6.3% in the US. Given that the internet now accounts for much more than 5-6% of media consumption, how far and how fast are other advertising channels going to fall, as ad spending follows media consumption?

2. Given the breakthrough that Google's attempt to select advertising for relevance rather than simply for reach, with a model of pay per click rather than pay per impression, how are you rethinking the basic model of intrusive advertising? Will other media also need to adopt the relevance model rather than the intrusive model? How will they accomplish this technically?

3. Relevance in advertising requires understanding what users are looking for. That means knowing way more about them than at any time in the past. Old style thinking sees this as an invasion of privacy, but Google and others have demonstrated that if advertising is truly useful to the recipient, they will accept a much greater degree of knowledge on the part of the advertiser. How do you create trust with the recipients of targeted advertising such that they are willing to have you know more about them?

4. How do ad agencies, publishers, and advertisers take advantage of the conversational nature of the internet, where word of mouth may carry more power than even the best crafted ad campaign? How do you create and harness "viral advertising"?

5. Obviously, some advertisers have already figured out how to harness "viral" advertising that users customize and pass along by themselves. Elf Yourself" from OfficeMax was briefly one of the top internet sites this past Christmas. Is this the dumbing down of viral marketing?

6. How does the role of an ad agency change as the opportunity changes from matching large advertisers with large publishers to a horizontal aggregation of passionate "long tail" audiences? Google aggregates these audiences algorithmically, but there are also next generation intermediaries like FM Publishing [disclosure: I am an investor] who are working to bring together those audiences that were previously unreachable by large advertisers.

7. What are the risks to advertisers of bringing user generated content into their ad campaigns? There have been a number of notable gaffes when companies aren't liked or trusted by their marketplace. Does the increased transparency of the internet change the compact between advertisers and their audience?

8. In many ways, advertising was the first web service, since web ads are usually placed by automated cooperation between an advertiser site, a publisher's site, and an ad broker. What risks does this web-based ad approach carry? (For example, an O'Reilly-managed site recently appeared to have been hacked. What happened instead was that a domain belonging to an advertiser whose Javascript was running on the site had its registration lapse. A porn site snapped up the domain and and injected their ads instead.)

9. Television is one of the largest ad markets -- $164B worldwide by JP Morgan estimates. As YouTube increasingly competes with television, what kind of advertising do you see taking hold there? Pre-roll and post-roll seem very 1.0 to me. Maybe even .5.

10. What do you make of experiments like RyanAir's incorporation of an advertising revenue model into an industry not previously seen as an advertising vehicle? Where else are we going to see advertising cropping up?

11. What kind of content is not likely to be subsidized by advertising?

12. How do you react to the threat of competition from low-cost competitors like craigslist who are happy to give away for free what you used to charge for?

13. Mobile may soon dwarf the web in its importance in the media landscape. Yet we have no breakthrough form of advertising on the platform. What might lead to a google-like breakthrough? Location as relevance?