 
avant|marketer: So we will soon see real-time branding optimization algorithms be made to work with the data streams that are coming off of say, Dynamic Logic's technology, in a standardized fashion?
Hitendra Wadhwa: I think we are going to see something like this happen. But, it's not going to happen until there is some significant level of agreement that advertisers come to over which branding measurement providers are using measurement methodologies and metrics that are useful and correct. Until you have you have this agreement, you really can't have accountable brand advertising happening in the online world, in the first place. And any real-time optimization process, of course, is only as good as the data you feed into it. So branding optimization is a really a second step, that will come after all of this has been ironed-out.
Dynamic Logic has certainly been working hard to innovate and work towards the standardization of certain metrics. And more and more important companies are gravitating toward, and getting comfortable with their metrics. The more we see companies like Dynamic Logic being able to evaluate online branding investments on the basis of these metrics, and put these investments on an equal footing with offline branding initiatives - which is key - the closer we are to bringing in real-time branding optimization, and doing some very powerful things here.
avant|marketer: Right now, media planners and buyers expend significant efforts manually managing campaign optimization efforts. If automated real-time optimization supplants manual efforts at campaign optimization, what becomes the job of media planners and buyers? How will real-time optimization change Internet media buying and planning?
Hitendra Wadhwa: Well, obviously, real-time optimization, if it takes root across the industry, will be a significant driver in shifting online media buyers and planners away from the drudgery of manual analysis.
How will it more broadly change their role?
Naturally, media buyers will still play the important role of defining the advertiser's overall media strategy, based on the advertiser's objectives, identifying the right kinds of media buys to do for the advertiser, and negotiating those buys on the advertiser's behalf.
That said, I think the broader, more fundamental change we'll see in the roles of media buyers, brought about by real-time optimization, is that it will allow the buyers and sellers of interactive media to act in a much more collaborative way, because both sides, through the use of this technology, will be able to seek and extract the best performance from campaigns - in terms of say, converting impressions into actions, on the back end - in a much more structured, transparent way.
avant|marketer: Finally, think beyond real-time optimization alone: What do you believe the next two to three years in the Internet Advertising space are going to bring, particularly from the standpoint of automation and technology - which are two of Paramark's main themes?
Hitendra Wadhwa: Well, first I expect that there will be very dramatic steps forward in the area of Rich Media, leading ultimately to a new paradigms in how we engage with consumers on the Internet.
I'm particularly very fascinated by the distinction that we typically make between an active consumer (we think of consumers on the Internet as being in an "active" mode), and a passive consumer (which the way in which usually think of consumers when they are viewing TV), and how, as you add more and more Rich Media to the Internet, the consumer's state of engagement can be made to vacillate back-and-forth between an active and a passive state. I think, ultimately, this ability to make a consumers state vacillate between the active and passive modes will mean new rules for how we market to consumers on the Internet. And, I think this is going to be an area in which we'll see huge innovation over the next two or three years.
On the automation side, I believe we're going to see a rapidly increasing integration of customer profiling across multiple online and offline channels. In part, this is going to be driven by the eCRM initiatives that Fortune 500 companies are already engaging in, and, in part, by the renewed realization, which happened over the last year or so, that, ultimately, online is part of a larger mix of channels that should be viewed in unity with the others, in many ways. What's going to happen is this integration of profiling and targeting across these multiple channels is going to be actually supported by optimization, to allow marketers to leverage their full knowledge of the customers they're marketing to across all marketing touch points, in as close to real-time as possible.
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