This week I attended the IAB Social Media Marketing and Web 2.0 Intensive One-Day Course, here in Toronto. The day-long event was hosted by Mitch Joel, a digital media rockstar, principal of the Twist Image agency based in Montreal, and host of the Six Pixels Of Separation podcast.

The course was very thorough, very informative and it was presented in a very engaging and inspiring way by a man who not only "gets it", he lives and breathes it! The course covered the following main areas of the online landscape:

• RSS and Syndication (Google Reader, feeds)
• Tags and Tagging (Flikr, Del.icio.us, YouTube)
• Online Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Blogs and blogging (including Twitter)
• Podcasts
• User Generated Content (or Consumer Generated Content)
• Wikis (Wikipedia, PodCamp, etc.)
• Virtual Worlds (Second Life, Webkinz, Habo Hotel, etc.)

A big focus of the material was skewed towards determining ROI and identifying the metrics that can be used to gauge the effectiveness of these new media outlets. Obviously this is something that advertisers and agencies need to have in place before they they green-light any new project on one of these platforms, because the methods used in "traditional" online media (display media) don't necessarily apply. There was much discussion around how to accurately or more importantly effectively track the "performance" of a non-traditional campaign that may not be easy to quantify. This dilemma was particularly evident for the people in the crowd who were trying to sell the idea of doing a cutting-edge campaign to their client or management. The old rules are good for some things, but don't always work. For example, how do you measure the effectiveness or impact of having a Podcast or a Blog on your brand's value? Well, there are ways, but they may not all fall under the category of "scientific data". And sometimes the effects are not directly related to the cause. 

What may seem like a great idea at the time doesn't always work out. There were quite a few humerous examples of companies that tried to be "hip" by adopting the latest platform for their new marketing campaign, only to end up on the wrong end of the PR-backlash stick. These examples were not only amusing, but also very telling and served as great cautionary tales to those who might not otherwise do the research and think their ideas through to the potentially disastrous outcome. Case in point: the Walmart flog (fake blog). Mitch actually opened his presentation with a cartoon that lampooned the account executive who came up with that not-so brilliant idea.

The other message that was repeated over and over again, was that a lot of these things are so new that the long-term viability and marketing potential have not yet been proven, so there's quite a bit of "let's just put it out there and see what happens" going on. Ultimately, as with many technological innovations, the expression "only time will tell" is the closest we can come to predicting what will work and what won't. To be sure there will be winners and losers, and as with so many other things in life, the more you play, the more chances you have to win. The point to take home (or back to the office) was that these are pioneering times, and there will be casualties along the way, but these are also very exciting times full of opportunity and ripe for savvy and selective advertisers and marketers who are willing to take a chance.

If you are advertising on Google or anywhere on Google's network, and you want to prevent your competitors from clicking on your paid links, you can now specify an IP address that you want to prevent from seeing your ad. So the thinking being, if you can figure out the IP addresses of your competitors' computers, you can prevent them from seeing your ads and clicking on them with the intent of running up your tab. Sounds great, right? Well, not so fast. What's to stop your competitors from walking over to Starbucks with a laptop and using their WiFi network (thereby changing their IP address) in order to get your ads and start happily clicking away? Nothing. So all you're going to do is block your stupid lazy competitors, not the ones who are really intent on doing some financial damage. Nice try though.

This week Yahoo Canada announced it's own entry in the Search Marketing forum. The new service, called Yahoo Search Marketing, allows online advertisers to create pay-per-click campaigns tied to specified search terms, just like Live Search's AdCenter and Google Adwords. The system allows users to determine the position of their ads on the results page, track the number of clicks received, set budget limitations and test their creative.

“We've received an overwhelmingly positive response to the new search marketing platform to date and are thrilled to open it up to all businesses that want to take advantage of Yahoo Search Marketing's more intuitive and powerful system,” said Martin Byrne, Yahoo’s national director of search marketing in Canada. “By giving companies the right tools, visibility and environment to create highly effective search marketing campaigns, Yahoo is connecting businesses to consumers more effectively than ever before.”

So now the Big Three each have their own Canadian search engine ad solution. The challenge for Yahoo, as for Sympatico / MSN, is to get a share of the pie previously owned by Google.

This past weekend celebrated the biggest sporting event, and perhaps advertising opportunity, in the US and possibly North America. That's right, I'm talking about the Superbowl. Often billed as an event to watch for the commercials aired during breaks and halftime show as much as for the actual game, the Superbowl has been a cultural and marketing phenomenon for years. Do you remember the very first Apple commercial? It aired during the '84 Superbowl, and is still talked about over 20 years later. The fact that a 30s spot costs over $2.5m dollars is a pretty good indication of what kind of reach these ads get. But what about online? Does an event like the Superbowl offer any opportunities for online marketing? You bet!

So much emphasis is put on the ads that air during the Superbowl, that they have actually started being previewed online in the weeks before the actual event. These are commercials mind you, not films, with actual trailers that are prompting discussion in online forums. If that weren't enough, once the game has ended and the fans have all left the stadium, people are actually going to YouTube to vote for their favourite commercials aired during the game. AOL, iFilm, and Google Video all stand to make money as millions of people flock to their sites to see the commercials they missed. Sounds mighty strange in this age of PVRs and BitTorrent. Strange but true.

So what about the ads, and the campaigns, themselves? Well, this year was apparently a bit of a letdown on the creative side, but was notable for the amount of promotion pointing viewers to the web:

"Marketers showed more sophistication integrating the Internet into their campaigns but I wouldn't say we saw off the chart buzz compare to previous years," said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer with Nielsen Buzz Metrics in an article on CNN.

The buzz he's referring to is the ream of articles following the game that dissect, discuss, and drive even more people to view the ads long after the game. In that respect, maybe those advertisers do get their money's worth.

Everyone's talking video these days. So what's the deal? Here's a recap of some recent stats and stories from the Wild Wild Web.

According to eMarketer, the online video ad business will reach $2.35 BILLION dollars by 2010, up from $385 million in 2006. But even this prediction may be low:

"Recent news indicates that those estimates from June of this year may already be outdated," says David Hallerman, an eMarketer senior analyst. "Whether it's advertising or it's content, the internet audience increasingly wants video."

So many streams... According to the comScore Media Metrix results for August, Fox Interactive (which includes MySpace) beat out both YouTube and Yahoo! for streams served, with 1.4 billion streams during the month, accounting for 20.1% of the market. Not bad.

Not surprisingly, a few of the ad-serving heavyweights are coming out with products and services to cater to this blossoming market. Just last month at ad:tech NY, DoubleClick launched its first foray into the in-stream ad market with an update to the Motif product line, called Dart Motif for In-Stream. Then this week ValueClick launched a beta service offering in-stream and in-banner advertising for advertisers and publishers on its network of 13,000+ sites.

Meanwhile, the folks over at AOL have come up with a Video Search service and companion product to help other sites submit their video feeds to the AOL Video Search index, as well as integrate video search into their own sites. The best part? It's completely free!

Why all the fuss? Because according to some industry survey, there is a massive shift of ad dollars coming over from TV:

"Of the 168 respondents, 33 percent predict that switch to be between 10 and 19 percent. Budgets for 2007 online advertising are expected to rise by an average of 42 percent over 2006."

No doubt there will be more news in this space over the coming months as online video continues to dominate the headlines. I'll be sure to keep you posted.