Biz Dev in NYC by Rob Tsai

 I sat in on an interesting pannel at the MIXX 2.7 Conference & Expo earlier this week:

The Changing Landscape
Industry deals among, Google and DoubleClick, Microsoft and aQuantive, Yahoo! and Right Media and WPP and 24/7 have created much speculation about the future landscape of our industry. For the first time ever on one stage, here from the CEO’s at all the acquired companies as they discuss the impact of their individual deals and the cumulative effect on data analysis, the competition for leveragable marketing insights and achieving media optimization. This session will help define the future of interactive media and is a must attend for all industry participants.

Moderator:
Saul Hansell, Editor, New York Times

Panelists:
David Moore, Chairman & CEO, 24/7 Real Media
David Rosenblatt, CEO, Doubleclick
Karl Siebrecht, President, Atlas
Michael Walrath, Founder and CEO, Right Media

Here’s a sample of a few interesting themes that emerged from the discussion:

Using technology to solve business problems

The Atlas CEO spoke about how the evolving media landscape is creating “problems that need technology”.   The NY Times recently ran an article about how Microsoft is using its $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive/Atlas to solve the problem of “conversion attribution”:

[The] proposed system, called “conversion attribution,” would track all of the online places where consumers see ads and give advertisers a fuller picture of the various ways that consumers reach them. Tracking is important, because the site that gets credit for prompting a user’s visit is the one that gets paid for it.

“Google gets all the credit, and in fact, you might have just gone to Google to type in the U.R.L.,” Mr. McAndrews [aQuantive CEO] said, pointing out that people often search for companies’ names after seeing their ads elsewhere.

Ad serving as “commodity”

Michael Walrath of Right Media called ad serving a commodity, and that companies are creating value through the services around it.

While David Rosenblatt of DoubleClick didn’t agree on ad serving as a commodity, he conceded -  “People don’t buy ad serving.  They buy yield management.”

For other coverage of MIXX, check out Mary Jo Foley’s post on ZDNet, and Randall Rothenberg’s post on I, A Bee.