The morning’s second panel Simon Assaad, CEO, Heavy; John Battelle, chairman, Federated Media; Shawn Gold, SVP, MySpace; Tina Sharkey,chairman, BabyCenter; Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO, Denuo and CIO of Publicis Media Group. Jimmy Guterman served as moderator.

—The Confusion Of Marketing And Advertising: Assaad began by noting that advertising methods are inherently traditional and seems to encourage old ways of thinking about marketing in general. New media demands a broader, more flexible approach based on connecting interested parties based on engagement. “In our Neanderthal thinking with respect to the internet, the easiest thing to do was to rely on the old models and methods. Marketing is the discipline of creating a conversation bet. two interested parties for the value of both. Advertising is based on search and banners - everything we used to do.” Battelle pointed the issue of measurement. He noted his work with comScore and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which last week called on comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings to overhaul their methods. “What we are measuring will change significantly. How do you measure the value of an ongoing conversation with someone who buys something once a year? It is difficult. You can say you’re measuring potential buying habits over a lifetime, but we have no standards for such measurements. There’s a lack of time when it comes to explain these issues. Clients are open to it, but it takes a lot of time. No one has written an algorithm for conversations.”

—Value Proposition of Social Nets: Gold said MySpace taps into it by helping people express themselves and allowing brands to try to relate to those expressions. Sharkey noted that influence marketing is an essential part of online marketing. “DJs are still around, but they aren’t the only ones introducing people to new music. It’s about tapping into social capital and how people share the music they’ve discovered with other people. You have to be in that conversation and it depends on making people part of the experience.”

—“Immersiveness”: The panelists discussed the impact of virtual environments like Second Life. Tobaccowala said that Second Life marketers suffer from “press release abuse,” adding more generally, “Why is it if people say they want a viral Subservient Chicken, do marketers then give them a Raging Bull? You have to give users what they want.”

—Subscription Services vs. Advertising: Assaad said that when it comes to subscription services, aside from porn, are not viable for most entertainment content. “If you’re MySpace and you can offer users additional storage or widgets, you could make money selling things that way. But advertising is going to be the most viable revenue model.” Nevertheless, he warned the tremendous amount of competition for those finite ad dollars is not likely to abate.

—Professional Content and User Content: Battelle suggested that NBC should have just put the video of the Virginia Tech shooter online and let users sort through it. Aside from possibly reducing the controversy it became embroiled in, Battelle added, “We would have learned a lot about the internet and would’ve grown as a culture.” He pointed to the intersection of professional and user content when bloggers steer the traditional media to a major story, such as when a company releases 17,000 pages of a document on a Friday and bloggers comb through it over the weekend and upload the juicy parts by Monday morning. The traditional media can then pick it up and run with it.