The 2nd session at ad:tech, The State of the Industry, involved media and publisher executives from MTV, AOL, Comcast and Publicis discussing the recession and its impact on media and advertising. Despite the recession, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimates that online advertising spending will surge past $20 billion in 2009 as marketers increasingly leverage digital media and technology platforms to establish a dialog with their customers, optimize messaging and delivery and, ultimately, drive brand preference.

The moderator and IAB President and CEO, Randall Rothenberg, questioned the panelists, "we're in an environment where everyone is concerned about CPMs going down, about whether media brands have any future at all, about whether brands have any future at all where audiences are being divorced from brands, and there is pressure on branding content. Yet you are all investing in it."

Joe McCarthy, President and CEO of Publicis New York gave some great examples of his clients such as Proctor & Gamble who are still bullish in this economy. Even Citibank maintained their ad spending given the recent financial meltdown although they are communicating different messages and talking to different constituents.

Jeff Levick, President, Global Advertising and Strategy of AOL, explained AOL's strategy to win in this economy is to focus on providing quality exclusive content to massive audiences. AOL is focused on hiring top journalists and editors that create content that is unique and speaks to local and niche audiences but global in scale.

Carolyn Everson, Chief Operating Officer and Executive VP of MTV Networks, told how they have great success selling MTV content in this economy but mentioned that clients wanted more scale and more control around context, relevance, and efficiency. MTV uses their audience to create content. Carolyn refers to this as open source or crowdsourcing. The horror movie Paranormal Activity was a highly successful example of crowdsourcing and viral marketing that didn't involve a massive marketing campaign. Moviegoers were asked to vote on which theaters they want that Paranormal Activity to be shown. The movie which was made for $15,000 went on to gross almost $80 million to date!

Amy L. Banse, President of Comcast Interactive Media and Senior VP, explained that the internet is becoming more of a consumption tool versus a search and discovery tool. People are coming to these brands and staying on these brands giving advertisers a great opportunity to target their customers. Privacy is one issue on digital marketers minds. How do you marry tracking technology with what the consumer wants?

Randall prodded, "You are all assuming that people will start having their channel preferences in this Search world. I'm not sure I can reconcile the power of search and the power of brands as destinations."

Amy explained that brands are going to work a lot harder in this Search world. What Search doesn't give the consumer and what consumers want is discovery. For example, how does one discover a new band where they don't even know how to search for it?

I think that new innovations in search such as the Bing Visual Search feature is a showcase where the knowledge of search could be applied to the discovery phase of the purchase cycle. As consumer behaviors change, there will be less distinction and more integration between search and discovery destinations. Also neither does the discovery phase have to always occur before search. 

Here are my key takeaways from the panelists:

1. Video and social media are hot topics for marketers

2. Marketers are spending in creating entertainment and content destinations and in mobile

3. Marketers are trying to integrate social media/social marketing to their advertising and branding campaigns

3. Few or no direct profit are being made from social marketing at the moment

4. Marketers should use social media marketing as an analytical and feedback tool to differentiate themselves in the marketplace and keep track of real time trends that impact brand. Taking action on these insights should impact profit in the short term and long term future.

5. Joe McCarthy recommends putting the brand of the consumer at the center of the marketing campaign and avoiding internal politics and the online/offline separation. Amy Banse adds, "As people become screen agnostic, marketing campaigns have to be screen agnostic."

6. Embrace change. Jeff Levick warns, "The worst thing an organization can do is to have a structure that is not about change. So constantly demanding, constantly embrace it and constantly challenging internally whether or not you're even changing frequently enough or dramatically enough."

7. Develop and promote leaders who are comfortable with digital marketing as well as other media. Carolyn Everson ended the session and spoke to rousing applause with her pointed take, "We need people that want to change, we need more digital natives in leadership positions so that it's not just led by traditional conversations and we need to find people that understand how to do a marketing plan regardless of the platform."

Check out more of our coverage of ad:tech New York 2009