A selection out of the top 10 things that Jay has taken away from AD:TECH:

1. Prime Time Television’s days are numbered as the most powerful in a marketer’s arsenal. TIVO’s and other forms of recording, zipping and zapping are drastically reducing commercial viewership. The effectiveness and measurability of online will make the internet our most powerful tool one day soon.

2. Shopping sites are significantly altering online retail performance. Customers are visiting brand sites for information and then going to Shopping.com, nextag.com or froogle.com to look for the best deal.

4. Viral Marketing is Back with a Blast.

7. The website is becoming the most important face of a brand, if you have a poor website your brand will begin to erode.

10. The Sales Funnel is the next online battleground. Marketers are getting better at driving traffic to the site; improving conversion will move you to the next level. Determine where customers are dropping out of the sales funnel, do research with customers, test, test and test.

[Dana's Blog]

An unnamed correspondent writes: “Dave, how I can explain to my large media corporation higher-ups why it’s not a bad thing that they lose traffic (and therefore revenue) if their readers are using our RSS feeds instead of visiting the site? I understand why RSS is a good idea from a user perspective, but what’s the argument from the content provider perspective? Can you feed the ads too? Is it possible to track traffic on an RSS feed to know how many people are subscribed?” I hear these questions all the time, and am glad to have an opportunity to answer them here. This site is the perfect place. First, I don’t think that providing RSS feeds, if you do it right, lowers traffic, in fact I think you can gain traffic. [RSS]

Google en Yahoo vormen een onderschatte bedreiging voor printmedia. Met de mogelijkheid te adverteren bij zoekresultaten vormen zij een effectief alternatief voor adverteren in vak- en special interest tijdschriften. Dat zegt Pat Kenealy, ceo van de internationale uitgeverij IDG. [Marketingtribune]

RSS is becoming a highly pervasive information distribution channel in our rapidly expanding universe. Here is a new tool that allows PowerPoint presentations to easily integrate RSS feeds and news headlines. The Take-off RSS news reader from DataPoint gathers RSS news and sends them directly into a Mircosoft Access database. From there they can be easily pulled inside one or more presentation slides. Thus, you could have fresh and updated news feeds to show on your class opening presentation slide or you could display the latest relevant stock, or future prices for the very items that you have been covering in your presentation. [Robin Good]

Fred Wilson gets it. It seems he had an a-ha moment and explains how his feeds are receiving more traffic then his weblog. “I’ve got two to three times as many people who read my feed as those who read my blog. And the ratio is going up every day.” In an email conversation with Fred this week, he explained to me why he has ads on his weblog. He said, ‘I do it to understand how all of this stuff works.’ Great attitude to have. [Pheedo] [A VC]

Why are we still using email as a communication tool (for both personal and commercial uses)! If SPAM and Viruses are the deadly duo, is RSS the Superhero or the Right Spam Solution that could rescue us from the glut of SPAM and Viruses? [Pheedo]