What technology advanced the industry the most in 2006?
Hespos: Flash. I think Flash will be the answer to this question for the next several years.
Epstein: In-game advertising has the highest potential to move the brand needle for major advertisers, and the leading companies in the space, along with top agencies and advertisers, advanced both the art and the craft of in-game advertising.
Huxley: Video sharing was the epicenter for much of the innovation online this year. Whether it was NBC wrestling with how to best control and capture the success of "Lazy Sunday" clips that changed the course of the mid-term such as the Michael J. Fox stem cell ad or the infamous "Maccaca" clip, or the phenomena of Lonelygirl15, YouTube was inescapable. The ability of consumers to easily create, share and rate video content was enabled by ever-cheaper bandwidth and finally reached critical mass this year. Also, moves by Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Google to integrate this type of content into their basic services guarantees that online video will be one of the staples of digital content moving forward.
Lawson: Video.
What technology was the most overrated?
Epstein: Not really a technology, but user-generated video content has, in many instances, moved remarkably quickly from being the voice of the people to just another commercialized outlet.
Hespos: Black-box optimizers. They've always been a joke, but the punchline is especially funny now, for some reason.
Lawson: Expanding media. Or pre-roll. Or Podcasting
What technology was the most overlooked?
Epstein: Avant Interactive's v-click technology has been quietly advancing the level and quality of clickable video, combining the appeal of video with true interactive abilities in a way that is easy to produce.
Hespos: Ad management companies like to say that 80 percent of their features are overlooked by the agencies and publishers that use them every day. They're probably right. There are some great targeting options, unrealized workflow efficiencies and intelligence-gathering abilities buried inside tools like Atlas and DART. Somehow, much of this great stuff manages to get overlooked.
Huxley: There were several notable efforts to better integrate marketing into RSS. The potential for feeds is huge in terms of targeting and frequency, and the integration of feeds into IE7 ensures mainstream adoption into next year. Marketers have tended to look at RSS as an extension of keyword advertising, when in fact it allows for some more interesting creative.
What was the biggest innovation in video?
Epstein: The ability to run Flash and other standard video formats inside of video games increases the efficacy of that medium, and doing video inside of games without impeding game performance is an amazing technology accomplishment.
Hespos: In-stream solutions from the third-party servers.
Lawson: YouTube.
Philalithes: Now, everyone is a filmmaker. Blogs brought forth the democratization of content. Video takes it to the next level-- the democratization of advertising. Think Mentos and Diet Coke. Increased broadband speeds, advances in streaming technology and high quality video over the internet became a reality in 2006. With this in mind, a major innovation in 2006 was YouTube. YouTube redefined the rules by allowing people to post and share video content, whether it's personal home video clips or segments from major networks, such as David Letterman. This shift to video over the internet is opening up new methods for advertisers to reach their target audiences with greater efficiency through video advertisements. While YouTube doesn't earn revenue from its site (yet), there are other companies in the online video space that do. Revver.com and Brightcove are two to watch out for.
What was the biggest innovation in mobile?
Huxley: The opening of the carrier networks to advertisers, coupled with the aggressive integration of video onto handsets has created a true third screen for marketers. Once closed systems, these are becoming accessible in line with consumer adoption of data services just in time. As the platform matures, advertisers will have great new opportunities with geo-targeting and local opportunities.
Hespos: The biggest innovation was the change in thinking by ESPN that caused it to shut its mobile service down.
What was the biggest innovation in targeting?
Philalithes: InLine advertising was a 2006 front-runner in targeting. InLine advertising is also known as the in-text advertisement model. The InLine model allows companies to display their ads to consumers, in a less obtrusive manner. Specifically, pay-per-click ads appear within the actual page's content and are only seen when the user "mouses" over the relevant keywords. When doing so, unique hyperlinks appear that, in turn, take users through to advertiser's ads. InLine opens a format to monetizing user-generated content in a relevant and targeted way that is non-intrusive to internet users.
Hespos: I don't think there were any significant innovations in targeting in 2006, but I think the industry did a fairly good job this year of learning to use things that had already been on the scene for a while. Behavioral targeting is getting there, as is retargeting, dayparting, language targeting and a bunch of other things that were underutilized in the past.
Lawson: Behavioral came of age.
Did anything come to fruition this year that you thought you'd never see?
Berens: YouTube. Even without the acquisition, the stunning ascent of that company from nothing to a media destination with planetwide recognition was nothing less than shocking. Back in the bubble days, I worked at an online video site that crashed, and so it was both welcome and bittersweet to see YouTube flourish.
But the real significance of YouTube and other video-sharing sites -- as well as non-video social media phenomena like MySpace -- is that they have fundamentally expanded the internet from a lean-forward medium to a hybrid where users oscillate between actively doing things and passively watching video-- just like on TV. That is a large cognitive shift and one that will continue to have strong repercussions.
Lawson: IAB standardized definition of what an "ad view" is. Only took the industry 11 years to come up with it.