Final Gnomedex session on the future of advertising. Nothing really groundbreaking here, but good information.
Gokul Rajaram: Online advertising — comprises a trinity–end-users, publishers and advertisers. Image ads – advertisers wanted a richer way to tell their story. Banner ads failed to succeed because they were untargeted–irrelevant to the page you were on.
Mark Pincus: Google ads didn’t cut it for Tribe.net–users weren’t in the right frame of mind. There will always be glitzy crap. Google AdWords can be a vengeance mechanism to strike back against unethical business operators.
Bill Flitter: Conversational advertising. Someone bringing up a brand in a weblog. Things don’t have to be in your face to be effective. Consumers are fed up with the current flashy/pop-up advertising strategies. “Open source marketing”. The whole idea of the consumer and publisher make choices. Phedo helps micropublishers monetize their content (advertising on their sites and in RSS feeds).
Apparently from Dave Taylor – a list of links to different Web sites that offer a good starting point for learning more about the future of online advertising: http://free-web-money.com/.
Dave McClure: Thinks e-mail marketing is still relevant.
Jeff Barr: The Lockergnome Amazon feeds are quite popular, and strangely, all ads.
Rajaram: Email marketing can be effective if done correctly and ethically.
McClure: Should you invest in organic SEO or paid search?
Pincus: If we enable our users to publish valuable, persisting content to Google Local, then that will be compelling to advertisers. Turned on recommendations, and was a compelling feature.
Henry Copeland: Google now regards itself, according to IPO documents, as an advertiser.
Rajaram: We’re fundamentally a search company. The majority of the company’s efforts are focussed on search. Google mission: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessable.
Flitter: RSS advertising will take a huge chunk away from email marketing. They’re building technology to help publishers understand their feed usage. We currently don’t know what’s going on at the aggregator level.
Copeland (thanks, Adam): We need to differentiate between influencers buying something and a non-influencer buying something. Blog readers are extra special.
McClure: eBay’s affiliate program pays the majority of cash out to few advertisers.
Pincus: There will be haves or have-nots. The haves will have an audience that will become a marketplace. Appeal to a specific audience and enable a conversation among them, therefore lending itself to becoming a great place to get leads. See also LeadClick.
Copeland: The future will be a growing number of infopreneurs–attacking niches that can now be attacked, because all of the infrastructure is taken care of for you.
Flitter: Bloggers are building a brand, and obviously you can sell that brand. There’s plenty of opportunity for bloggers to successfully sell content.
Copeland: 0.5% of every blog’s readers are potential advertisers. Intuition goes a long way.
I tend to get bored later in the session (they’re an hour and a half), so my notes tend to wane.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I’m probably missing a highly subtle point here . . . but could someone explain how it’s come about that advertisers are still using appallingly cheesy annoying flashy ads that everyone and their grandmother and their dog hates ? What are they on ?
How about a competition for the most annoying site ?
The comment about influencers and non-influencers came from Copeland. He was trying to justify the fact that Blogads does no targeting whatsoever by hyping the serendipitous nature of his ads. Since there’s no structure, you never know when you’ll find something good.