From Web 2.0: Advertising panel

My old colleague from the Boston Globe, Scott Meyer, was moderating a panel this morning at Web 2.0 on advertising. (Scott is now CEO of About.com, owned by the NY Times Company.) Panelists included reps from paidContent, Brightcove, Avenue A | Razorfish, and NBC Universal.

Michael Steib from NBC Universal said some advertising becomes content that people will seek out; he said he'd gone to Apple's site to watch all of the Mac-and-PC ads.

Jeff Lanctot from Razorfish observed that most companies/agencies aren't producing ads specifically for the Web, though he mentioned that his agency had done some video "skyscraper" ads for Levi's recently.

Rafat Ali from PaidContent said that his maximum tolerance for video ads shown before a short clip is five seconds.

Afterward, I chatted with Todd Sacerdoti from Brightroll, who was on a different panel (more specifically on video.) Brightroll sells and inserts ads in video content.

We talked a bit about how Google and YouTube will approach advertising. I wondered whether Google and YouTube might just try and sell text ads and banners around video, without integrating anything into the video. He disagreed, saying, "Google is going to monetize the unit -- maybe not on the YouTube site," but perhaps on Google Video, or videos that they syndicate to other sites in the Google player. "They're anti-pre-roll," he said, referring to Google execs, "but they may do mid-roll between videos. They'll find a way to get you to watch ads."

I'm here for much of the conference through Thursday, so if you're here, too -- say hello.