Sgambelluri: To the extent that you can answer, what would you describe as your biggest success working on the P&G account at MediaVest? Through this experience, what's the most important lesson you learned with regard to interactive marketing?

Gerber: I can't really answer with any specificity to P&G, or their business. What I can tell you is what I've observed through my experiences at Digital Edge and MediaVest over the past six years, and at traditional agencies before that.

At the end of the day, success comes down to having passionate people on both the agency and client side who are willing to break down barriers. We are in a time of change, and the best ideas require existing processes and expectations to be modified, if not drastically changed. It's easy for TV and Print advertising to basically "happen by itself." It's understood, and it's formulaic to a certain degree (for the creatives in the audience, I don't mean the ad concept and idea are formulaic, just the business implementation of planning, buying and executing).

Interactive marketing is new, it's dynamic, and it's unpredictable. As an agency, you have to make sure your clients understand this and are excited by it. As a client, you have to be open to more risk. At the end of the day, though, the upside is much more valuable: it's an investment in the future.

Sgambelluri: In an October 21, 2002 interview with iMedia, we asked you, "What remains the industry's biggest stumbling block?" You answered,

• Non-traditional ad delivery, reach & frequency evolution, impression measurement, bigger ads/less clutter, improved branding research, email marketing clean-up, creative unit/technology standardization, and terms & conditions.

Which of these do you feel we've made progress with? Are any of there bigger problems today? And what new stumbling blocks have emerged recently?

Gerber: I think the industry has made good progress in a number of areas. Thanks to efforts primarily of the IAB, we now have a global ad measurement standard, and proposed audit and certification guidelines. This work will become a core foundation for future advanced TV/video accountability standards as things are looked at more holistically.

We also have seen what I think is great progress in the area of ad format/unit standardization, Again, the release by the IAB of their Universal Ad Package drove this, and work by key publishers, agencies and rich media companies to align to it made it a success.

I think we've made some progress on T & C's (terms and conditions). We have a document that's been negotiated by the IAB and 4As. Unfortunately, some agencies and publishers continue to try work outside the bounds of those guidelines. One reason for that may be that we have new, evolving issues that need to be incorporated into the document related to data, video, interactivity, etc.

Luckily, I think the email issue has become a non-issue-- at least for large scale marketers using it for acquisition purposes. Legislation related to spam along with new filtering technology has made email marketing a much less attractive option. But it still has tremendous value from a CRM, and opt-in perspective.

I still think we have a good amount of work to do in the area of branding research, reach/frequency and next-generation metric accountability. Those are tough areas. We have a basic understanding of online media's branding impact thanks to work by Dynamic Logic and Rex Briggs (Marketing Evolution). We need to dig much deeper to understand its relative value versus other potential investments -- especially in the area of video. In terms of reach/frequency, in my opinion, we are on the cusp of really having the current approach to video measurement fall apart. Nielsen data is just not going to be able to keep up with growing fragmentation across programming outlets, devices, and on-demand experiences. For marketers who are activating video in linear TV, via the internet, and through on-demand platforms like iTunes, there just is no platform agnostic measurement solution. Project Apollo has promise to get us there, but it is not intended to be a currency driving platform. It will be interesting to see how this measurement area evolves.

Sgambelluri: Anything you wish I would have asked you?

Gerber: I think I've already taken up too much space, don't you think! Seriously, we could go on endlessly about how our business is changing. Hopefully, I've made a little bit of sense with my answers, and sparked some thoughts amongst your readers.