The discussion panel was comprised of Mike Maleski; Cleveland.com, Lori Gatto; Things Remembered, and Jim Kukral of ReveNews who offered great insight into the current trends in digital advertising and affiliate marketing.

Discussion started off with the question, 'What does Web 2.0 mean?' Basically it's a meeting point of social networking, folksonomies, and people coming to collaborate and share info online in previous unavailable ways.

Mike mentioned that at Cleveland.com and the PD he deals a lot with online spending to support offline brands. Internet ad spending grew 49% during the first half of this year over last year - much of it coming from offline. He said that he is seeing a lot more offline advertising spending.

He used one of his clients, Sunset Memorial Park Cemetery as an example. They put their message in front of the online death notices based upon more elderly and veterans going online. They had a $500 gas card promotion and received over 100 leads. They recognize the value of the brand and were able to collect direct leads of veterans and got access to this market.

Lori said that digital advertising is used to drive more retail sales through various channels. 65% of her customers are online with many purchasing as well. Things Remembered is a multi-channel retailer.

Jim said that getting ROI back is very important. Besides leads getting qualifying leads is important. A trend is setting up custom landing pages within websites to focus on prospects giving you information.

Jim cited an example that he had with Mark Cuban, the outgoing Dallas Mavericks NBA team owner. Jim built a "Mark Cuban please call me.com" site, trying to test the influence of a one page blog. Jim did get some response - he was written up in the Dallas paper and picked up by 10 blogs. Mark Cuban did actually email Jim about some unrelated advice!

A question was posed, are advertisers pulling away from other media such as print, radio, TV? Mike responded that those media are not losing as much as people think.

Total online advertising is predicted to grow at a compound rate of 11% from 2006-2011.

Are banner ads dead or is rich media taking over? Jim responded that banner ads aren't dead. For smaller companies you need to be more creative. Again, executives want to see ROI. Behavior ad targeting, which is based upon what customers are looking for, has become more popular. Use banners ads to stimulate branding.

ROI vs. branding driven. Mike mentioned that Cleveland.com collects user gender, year of birth and zip code for advertisers. Branding is the experience although it is a waste of money if you are just gathering information. Cleveland.com is not planning to open up a PPC platform on its website any time soon - they are sticking with the CPM model.

Jim said that on his blog he uses primarily text ads and subtle banner ads. Actually, he prefers to call them 'sponsorships' instead of 'ads.' The term sponsorships has a better connotation. Jim mentioned the website askthebuilder.com has great click-through rate using video ads with a short, 30 second, burst. The click-through rates, so far, have been performing well.

Regarding Affiliate marketing, Jim stated that affiliates have become wiser and more targeted but the whole sector has never been bigger. "It's like a 3rd party sales force" for a website. It's a relationship business.

Lori said that people are putting money into paid search though more affiliates are asking for higher commission. There seems to be a trend toward affiliates becoming more niche-oriented and creative. Her company's affiliate sales are still growing but at a decreasing rate, 2004-2005 - 25%, and 2005-2006 - 14%.

It's important to reach out to your affiliates. Things Remembered has approximately 15,000 affiliates of which 700 are active. Typical affiliate payments are either based on pay per lead or paid as an incentive. Obviously, affiliates want more as far as incentives and commissions are concerned. The number of Return Days is another point of leverage.

What should you look for in an affiliate? Probably the more niche-oriented, the better. What is a good click-through rate? Typically, anywhere from .05% - 12% - as one can see, it varies. Coupons have a tendency to have a higher click-through rate.

Blogs, podcasts, RSS Feeds, and Online Video have created new advertising opportunities. Regarding newer technologies, advertisers will spend $400M on online video ads in 2006 and $1.3B by 2011.

Jim stated that there is a lot of marketing activity within blogs. It's all about high quality content. Having a corporate blog is the best line of communications with your customers - you control the conversation about your brand. You can build a community of customer evangelists.

From Mike's perspective, using Cleveland.com as an example, blogs have integrated the print and online media. On a side note, he would like to see quality content such as quality medical content from our health services industry have greater recognition and visibility.

Web Video services such as YouTube are hot right now. Video ads over personal communication devices are another area to keep an eye on in the near future. Video ads are getting a lot of traction.

RSS feeds could be a supplement to email marketing where there is a definite need to have double opt-in.

A few fun facts to end on - 52% of MySpace users actually are over 35 years of age.

Cleveland.com, per Mike, is looking at having a search engine based upon all of its past many years of content - it could be a gold mine!

By Team Geek correspondent Mark Geyman of OhioBiz

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