iMedia editors at the Brand Summit in Coconut Point this week contributed to this piece.

If yesterday’s conversations at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Point centered on more general concepts, such as multicultural marketing and integration, during the second day of the conference, attendees got more specific.

The morning began with keynote interviews of CBS Digital Media President Larry Kramer and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive CEO and Publisher Caroline Little, who spoke about CBS’s initiatives into alternative content distribution, such as video iPods (coming up next month) and WashingtonPost’s growth from a local newspaper to a national information powerhouse.

The year 2006 is shaping up to be “the year of content” and the keynote presenters certainly spoke at length about that, but that wasn’t the buzz following the keynotes. Few people in the audience were aware of Kramer’s journalism background, which began with covering Woodstock-- his first assignment. People were also surprised about just how popular CBS’ MacGyver reruns still are. (For those of you who missed it, MasterCard resurrected MacGyver star Richard Dean Anderson for an ad in this year's Super Bowl.)

Outside the main conference room, conversations covered everything from the previous night’s cocktail parties, to weather.com’s dinner (which had a Four Season’s theme and an intriguing gymnast on stilts dressed as a grapevine), to more pressing issues, such as staffing, which seems to keep everyone up at night. The dearth of available talent seems so severe that companies are poaching employees from each other and there is very little new talent coming into the industry. No one seems to have the answer to the question of “how do we attract more people to interactive advertising?”

Despite the shortage of resumes with online experience, this industry is churning out amazing creative, as Mark Naples highlighted in his presentation of video best practices. He spoke about leveraging interactivity in online video branding campaigns and most of the marketers agreed with him that pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll video is not enough. It has to be interactive to make a brand’s message really stick.

According to eMarketer, advertisers will spent at least $1.5 billion on video ads online by the end of the decade, but simply repurposing TV commercials online may be a waste of time and money. Without interactive elements, Naples demonstrated, video does not yield results such as 49 percent increases in site traffic or a 4.6 percent conversion rate, which was the case in the example of Rovion’s promotion for Century Fitness that included a virtual spokesperson.

Naples also cited the latest Jupiter Report, which showed that people now spend as much time online as they do watching television (14 hours a day on average), and it is not surprising that 50 percent of marketers think that television will soon lose effectiveness, according to Forrester.

The bottom line? Think about allowing your target audience to interact with your online video ads, don't just expect them to sit and watch. The results are worth the extra effort.

Following her case study presentation on integrated marketing, T3 CEO Gay Gaddis also had people talking. Using the example of JC Penney, Gaddis said that one of the biggest challenges of integrated marketing is determining how to incorporate just the right amount of different media into the mix. She said that by using too few media, marketers risk missing their target, but by using too many, then risk exhausting their time and resources without achieving the desired results.

Naturally, there is no fail-proof formula for the media mix, but it’s heartening to know that online can finally be said to be a necessary variable. As quite a few marketers agreed (though none were willing to be quoted without permission from their legal departments), the instances in which online delivers much better results than traditional media are growing in number and it’s no longer an uphill battle to add interactive to the media plan.

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