The Present of Online Advertising ( FOOA ) slides online...

...over here - click on each speaker's home icon to get their Future of Online Advertising talk.

Overall seems like it was a very good conference, sadly we couldn't go as we were too busy actually doing the stuff

CenterNetworks has done a review of the talks online, and a summary post pointing to them over here

The one theme that came out from a lot of the commentary on FOOA 07 was there was not enough thinking about the "future" of advertising, more about the present. We're not that surprised as by and large its an industry that seems very conservative in its adoption of new media.

(Yes, we know its now growing fast, but look at the gap between time online vs ad $ online, and the time lag....)

When we did our report research on interactive advertising this year, and in our work with interactive advertising startups over the last 2 years we interviewed a number of people in the "digital ad media" industry and were struck by how conservative (with a small c) the industry was structurally - ie there were some very go-ahead people, but by and large the industry seems to be clinging to an older world it rather prefers despite the rush of people's attention online

The industry stalwarts typically argued that this was because clients didn't want it, it was hard to measure etc etc, and there is something in this - but, as more than one Ad person we spoke to told me informally, its also that many Ad types far prefer chasing the creative awards and party circuit rather than doing the sort of unglamorous stuff that most 'net advertising boils down to - it is more like the much less loved (and lower status apparently) direct mail ad game, where results are musch more measurable and its all about small tweaks rather than large creates.

In a recent Beers and Innovation session in London called "Do Agencies Innovate", we had the same comments from Ad people (after a few beers) , and in fact a very interesting argument was made that the PR world is actually better structured for 'net advertising than the Ad world (as the 'net is more about many small conversations) - see our post on this here.

And of course it is becoming clear that all those megadollars spent on going into things like Second Life are..well, spent - rather than well spent.

Shameless plug - our report that we did with STL Partners on interactive advertising's impact on telecoms overall is available over here..