Dubbed “Points of Control”, the conference was its usual whirlwind of activity, but the centerpiece of the three-day event was a conversation between Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr and Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson.  While one described the current environment of venture-backed innovation as a “boom” and the other a “bubble,” both agree something big is afoot.

Doerr said that we’re in the middle of a huge third wave of innovation and, moreover, that today’s entrepreneurs are better and the ideas are better than ever before.  The combination of smart phones and the social graph, he said, and the friction-free way that consumers can behave within these environments makes this time more exciting than any previous one.  Wilson added that nothing great is ever created without irrational exuberance.

Though all this renewed exuberance is or will be good for everyone, it seems clear it will be particularly good for advertisers.  I also see opportunities for search marketers, both in terms of the work we do today and in the ways in which the scope of our work will shift as a result of so much innovation.

Google alone is nearly impossible to keep up with. If Google announces one more new product or one more new innovation or one more feature introduction, my head may explode.  I write a regular column for MediaPost and my SearchInsider colleague Kaila Colbin wrote compellingly recently about Google’s growing omnipresence, and last week Gord Hotchkiss showed how the right rail of ads on search results pages may be becoming extinct, among other seismic shifts in Google’s core search product.  And yet, amazingly, these seem only to be the tip of the iceberg.

Doerr said repeatedly in his talk that Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are the drivers of the Internet (Amazon is the cloud and commerce; Google is search, productivity and mobile; Apple is mobile, entertainment and apps; and Facebook is the social graph.)  But because Google drives search, and its search results increasingly integrate commerce, entertainment and the social graph, it is in the cat-bird seat.

On top of this layer of Web infrastructure are a growing host of important players in their own right.  Consider these numbers from the Conference:

• Twitter is generating about $100,000 per day via its “Promoted Suite” line of advertising products.
• LinkedIn is adding one new member per second and has 85 million users (which would be a more impressive number if Facebook didn’t have more than 500 million…)
• Yahoo! serves 18 billion ads per day.
• The Zappos CEO has only three pairs of shoes.
• Zero: Microsoft’s new Kinect is very likely sold out for the holidays even as I write this.
• More than 420 million people in China now have Internet access and 99 percent use Baidu.
• In about five years, most households will have some form of IPTV.
• Zynga’s Frontierville has 650,000 same-sex marriages (oh: and 320 million people worldwide have played their games.)  And they’re just three years old, a billion dollar company and profitable.

The big, overarching take-away message from Web 2.0 Summit, however, is that mobile is a monster market trend, as Doerr put it, and is just getting started.  If we’re in a bubble / boom, it’s because everyone is re-thinking every service and every function in an increasingly networked and mobile economy.

Another trend is the war for talent.  While the rest of the country may be suffering nine percent unemployment, employers in the Bay Area and New York are struggling to find and acquire talented, experienced people to work in proliferating, fast-growing venture-backed companies.

It’s clear that with a computer in nearly every person’s pocket, combined with a growing social graph, all aided and abetted by search, the opportunities for advertisers – and everyone – are more abundant than ever on the booming, bubbly Web.

Co-located with Advertising Week this year is the IAB Mixx conference, O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo and MediaPost’s OMMA Global.  Though each is unique in its own way, there are consistent themes across all four emerging this year.

First, it’s clear advertisers and marketers of all stripes are struggling with the growing convergence of publishing and marketing.  As YouTube, blogs, Twitter and Facebook increasingly demand non-traditional means of engagement and promotion, the slow death of the “old ways of doing things” presents hosts of challenges and opportunities.  On everyone’s lips, of course, is this year’s wildly successful Old Spice promotion, which effectively leveraged “old media” (that is, TV, cable, outdoor and radio) and new (YouTube videos, social media campaigns across Twitter and Facebook, and microsites).  Old media, it seems, drove engagement with new; new media went viral; and a moribund brand was revitalized and reborn.

Side-by-side these conversations are discussions about the rise of performance media — a fairly broad category that can include all those mediums that encourage an action by a consumer (a click, say) that then result in a highly measurable outcome (a purchase or a download or lead-gen, for instance).  So Search Marketing, Mobile Marketing, virtual games and currency and more are variously carried carried around in this bucket.

The days, it seems, of the “pure” branding campaign are numbered, to hear people talk.  Performance is all.  From campaign design to outcome measures and everything in between, marketers are concerned with creative, on the one hand, that spurs engagement, action or reaction; and instrumentation on the other, that enables precise tracking and reporting at every point along the marketing engagement process.

In the world of marketing and advertising, people traditionally fall into one of two buckets: “quants” and “quals”.  That is, there are folks who are naturally suited to quantitative activities (goals, metrics, measures, ROI calculation) and qualitative folks (those interested in motivations, feelings, emotions, actions and reactions).  Increasingly, marketers are under pressure to be both, all at once–creatives must be number crunchers and quants must be creative.

Because publishing-as-advertising has the virtue of being highly measurable (if campaigns and goals are designed well), and the full range of performance marketing techniques require creative that inspire an action that can be measured, it’s ideal for both the creative and quantitative to live in one person.  The trouble may be in actually finding those folks.

It is because of this momentum that the San Francisco Bay Area Working Group of SEMPO  organized its September Meet-Up last week around the topic of how best to organize social marketing campaigns.  Hosted by Google at its San Francisco office, the event was simulcast live to Google’s Santa Monica office, where the newly formed SEMPO-LA Working Group gathered to also participate in the event — a SEMPO first, I think.

Event panelist Pierre Legrain, product marketing manager for monetization at Twitter, provided some of the most memorable examples of how search marketers should leverage his channel. He spoke about the recent announcements from Twitter that include Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and its recently added Who to Follow feature.

Data that Legrain shared from the recent Old Spice social media phenomenon showed remarkable conversation spikes that coincided with releases of  company videos on YouTube and Facebook (among other channels).  One can imagine that by using Promoted Tweets or Promoted Trends, a brand could activate social conversations with promotional text and links — which, obviously, should be highly measurable and accrue to the bottom line.

Co-panelist John Yi, Strategic Program Manager for APIs at Facebook, also showed compelling examples of campaigns that leveraged its targeted ads, Facebook Pages, and its Analytics-like tracking and reporting dashboards.  A recent campaign by Starbucks, in which the coffee retailer promoted a free pastry giveaway through targeted advertising, the “Like-o-sphere,” and its own well-branded page, showed once again the highly effective ways in which a brand can activate its markets through targeted engagement with audiences.   According to Yi, the campaign was so successful that it increased intent to purchase by 94 percent.

Perhaps the most entertaining presentation came from panelist Rick Silvestrini of YouTube (owned by Google), who started with — naturally — a video case study showing how a brand with no traction or name recognition was able to generate millions in revenue by simply producing a highly effective video for its YouTube channel.  Silvestrini really hammered home the point that YouTube – and all social media, really — provides a level playing field.  Marketing success need not be the sole domain of big brands with big budgets.  As many start-up or smaller brands were represented in the audience, the message hit home.  He also pointed out the obvious linkages between YouTube and Google’s core search marketing offerings.  Also interesting, and core to SEMPO, was his assertion that YouTube is the Web’s second largest search engine — even ahead of the Bing-Yahoo combination — proof that understanding the “rules of engagement” in this slightly off-model search engine should be a key concern of search marketers.

As panelist Tezza Yujuico, Chief Sausage Maker (a.k.a., COO) of Athena East, a social marketing firm, pointed out, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube each represent unique opportunities to engage with audiences.  But all three are also synergistic.  Indeed, these three natural competitors (gathering, graciously, on Google’s turf) demonstrated over and over again how  each can feed into the other.  YouTube is the vehicle of choice for video content producers the world over.  That content is embeddable in blog posts and distributable via links on Twitter.  YouTube videos are also playable in Facebook newsfeed updates and Facebook Pages.  Each drives traffic, attention and engagement to the other.

Every day, according to Facebook, campaigns on its site increase search traffic by an average of 2.8x and CTRs by 50 percent.

What Yujuico really emphasized is by firmly establishing clear goals for social campaigns that complement, and indeed feed, search marketing efforts, Web marketers can effectively leverage each channel in concert.  And because of constantly increasing measurability across all platforms, the ability to show precise ROI on a total Web marketing effort is nearly unparalleled.

As more and more SEM professionals are called on to broaden their responsibilities, SEMPO may want to add an additional “S” — for “social” — to its own title.  Indeed, many in the audience already have.

Yahoo! Search senior vice president Shashi Seth announced today that a key milestone in the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance has been achieved: Bing now powers 100 percent of Yahoo’s organic (or natural) search results.  Apparently this is the case now for both the desktop product and mobile.

“Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come,” said Seth. “The speed in which this was completed is a testament to the great work and partnership between a number of Yahoo! and Microsoft employees, the ranks of which are numerous.”

Earlier this month, Yahoo! and Microsoft representatives reported that the transition was underway and that just about 25 percent of Yahoo’s natural search results and about three percent of paid search results were, at that point, powered by Bing.  They had set as early October the complete transition for both aspects of search, so completing the organic piece of the integration just a few weeks later is testament to the speed with which the joint team is executing.  There has been significant concern among search marketing professionals that the integration of the two platforms might not be completed in time for the all-important holiday season, so achievement of this first milestone will come as some relief to all concerned.

“We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall,” said Satya Nadella, senior vice president, online services division at Microsof.  ”As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season.”

For folks who’s organic or natural search rank on Microsoft’s Bing is lower than what it was in Yahoo! Search, it’s very important to begin working on your website to optimize it for the Bing search algorithm.  Use your tools in the Natural Search Optimizer module of the Yield Web Marketing Suite to ensure your site is in the best possible condition and to check your rank in Bing.  Also, for further information, check out the Bing Toolbox for webmasters. And, as always, if you have questions, email or call our Customer Success Reps who are available to assist you.

Stop by Our Booth on the Expo Floor!

Yield Software will be presenting and exhibiting at SES-San Francisco 2010 next week at Moscone West.  Our booth number is 416 — Matt, Jenae, Jacob and I will be hanging out there doing demos and schmoozing, and we’d love to say hello if you’re there.

If you’re not already registered for SES, you can still get a free exhibit hall pass — just visit Search Engine Strategies San Francisco to reserve a pass.  We’re also going to be giving away a free Apple iPad (a $499 value) from business cards dropped into the fishbowl at our booth, so be sure to bring yours along and drop it into the bowl.  We’ll do the drawing at the end of the conference and ship the winner’s new iPad directly from Apple.

One more thing to keep in mind: we’ve got a SES promotion you might want to check out.  It’s called our GET SMART promo and here’s how it works:

Sign up for a Yield Web Marketing Suite account for Advertisers or for Agencies before September 15, 2010 and we will include a complimentary “Smart Start” JumpStart worth more than $500.  Your Smart Start will include: Account Set-up; a PPC JumpStart for a single campaign; and 60 days of campaign optimization by one of our PPC experts from our Professional Services team. After 60 days, you’ll be able to take over management of your campaign with ease.

Even if you’re not able to join us at SES next week, do take advantage of the Smart Start JumpStart if you don’t already subscribe to the Yield Web Marketing Suite.  It’s a great way to get off to a solid start managing your SEM campaigns more efficiently, more effectively and more profitably.

SEMPO-San Francisco Bay Area Working Group Party

Join the SEMPO San Francisco Working Group at the post-SES Conference Party on Wednesday, August 18^th.   The hour-long social mixer and networking event will be held in Room 2001 of the Moscone West building in downtown San Francisco, and will begin shortly after the day’s final learning session.  Come join the post-seminar celebration fun and capitalize on an opportunity to meet industry professionals and learn about the latest trends in the world of search.

What’s in it for you?

Complimentary food and drinks (thanks to YouTube and Google)

An opportunity to expand your Search Engine Marketing industry professionals network

An opportunity to learn more about the local SEMPO organization and provide insight for our next event in September covering Trends in Social Media Marketing

For more information, please stop by the SEMPO San Francisco booth in SES-San Francisco Expo Hall on Tuesday August 17^th or Wednesday August 18^th.  Or simply stop by room 2001 at 6:30pm and join the fun and networking!  Also, be sure to join the SEMPO San Francisco conversation and follow us on Facebook and Linked In.

In yesterday’s Yahoo! Search Blog, they announced that they’ve begun a test incorporating Microsoft’s Bing search results in their pages.  They are displaying both natural and paid search results, but only in about 25 percent of Yahoo’s search results pages.  Here’s what you can expect to see:

Further, Yahoo! says their mobile search product will begin to incorporate Bing mobile search results in the coming weeks and months.  Notable is Yahoo’s assertion that they will “continue to innovate and enhance the overall consumer experience around those core listings.”  This means that while the search results themselves will be generated by Bing, other on-page features or enhancements will be driven by the Yahoo! Search team.

For this and other reasons, you will continue to see how your keywords rank in natural search results across Google, Yahoo! and Bing throughout and following completion of the Yahoo!-Bing search integration within the Yield Web Marketing Suite and our Natural Search Optimizer.  It is entirely possible that your keywords may rank slightly differently across Yahoo! and Bing based on a variety of factors throughout the integration process.

For all of our customers, rest assured we remain on top of these changes and will work to ensure all changes are seamless to you, even as we continue to keep you abreast of these changes as they’re occurring.  If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact your customer success rep.

The San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) has announced a new Meetup that will feature leaders from Yahoo! Search and Microsoft’s Bing discussing the coming integration of the two search engine giants.  Here’s the details:

What: SEMPO-SF Bay Area Learning Series: Inside the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance

When: Monday, July 26, 2010 at 6:00 p.m. PDT

Where:  Microsoft Corporation – San Francisco Centre, 835 Market Street, Seventh Floor, Golden Gate North & South Rooms, San Francisco

One of the most significant developments in the search marketing industry recently has been the formation of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, which promises to bring together the Yahoo! Search and Bing networks to provide advertisers with greater scale and faster innovation. As a search marketer, are you ready to adapt your marketing strategy to take full advantage of this paradigm shift?

Join SEMPO San Francisco for Inside the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. This event will feature in-depth presentations from Yahoo! and Microsoft transition leads, followed by a question and answer session. Post your own questions and vote on questions from others here.

At this event you will hear about:

• Overview of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance and what it means
• Implications and benefits of the search alliance for advertisers
• Updates on feature differences between platforms
• Share next steps specific to a customer’s transition options

Speakers include:

• Jon Mette, Senior Strategist, Search Optimization & Strategy, Yahoo!
• Michael Elmgreen, Account Executive, Search Agency Sales, Microsoft
• More to follow…

You can follow SEMPO-SF Bay Area on:
Facebook
LinkedIn

Learn more and register here:
http://www.meetup.com/SEMPOSanFrancisco/calendar/14035004/

Google is constantly making changes to its algorithms, which determine what websites appear in their natural search results and in what order they appear. Most changes do not have significant impacts, but Google’s recent change made between April 28th and May 3rd — called the “May Day Update” because it happened mostly on May 1st, but also “Mayday Update” because of its potential adverse impacts on websites — has resulted in the following for many websites:

• Rank of deeper individual pages within websites
• Rank for long tail keyword searches (three-plus words in the search query)

In a nutshell, Google has cracked down on quality for longer-tail keywords – making its evaluation of deeper individual website pages more similar to how it conducts natural search rankings for keyword searches with one-to-two words.

This is probably due to the fact that more and more searches these days contain more than three words, so it’s necessary for Google to ensure that its search results for these searches bring back the most relevant and highest quality results possible.

You can think of the change this way: your homepage is like the parent and it used to be able to boost up its children (the individual page on its website) just by having great authority itself — similar to how a parent’s reputation can often help children get a leg up in the world. But now, your individual pages have all grown up and are standing on their own two feet. Google is evaluating each of your website pages individually – for their own unique relevancy and individual page quality.

This individual evaluation will help Google ensure that even for the long-tail searches it is always providing a great set of search results.

What this means for websites:

• No more free rides for any of your individual pages based on your overall domain authority.
• All individual website pages must include unique and truly useful content.
• All individual website pages must have a strong back-link profile.

Who is typically “negatively” impacted by Google’s Mayday… er… May Day update?

• Deeper internal pages with duplicate content and no links
• Automatically-generated pages and content farms

Were you impacted?

Review your stats from around April 28th to May 3rd with an eye out on the following:

• Natural search traffic volumes coming to your deeper internal website pages
• Volume of natural search traffic you are received from long tail searches (three-plus keywords)

Google says the May Day change is here to stay, so what do you need to focus on?

There is nothing new here – just the same basic SEO principles, but now it’s imperative that your focus extends across all pages of your website, not just your home page and a few other top-level pages.

Here’s what you need to focus on for all individual pages of your website:

• Make sure you have unique, valuable and truly useful content on all of your individual pages within your site. How do you do this? Put yourself in the searcher’s shoes and think about what would truly help them in their quest for information that no one else is currently doing a great job of providing. Some examples include:

1. Reviews, videos, images, comments, etc. are all great ways to help make your content both unique and valuable to searchers. Leverage user generated content as much as possible so the workload is not so daunting.
2. If you have any copied or duplicate content (like from a manufacturer), replace it with your own unique content.

• Get lots of links for every single page. Ensure your link building campaigns focus on all of the individual pages for your site and not just your homepage and first tier pages. How do you do this?

1. Make it easy to link to your individual pages and encourage others to do this.
2. Link out to others in your blogs, forums, comments, etc to encourage others to link back to you.
3. Promote all of your content pieces individually.
4. Produce very unique and valuable content that others will want to link to.
5. Create a strong internal linking structure within the pages of your own website with long tail variations on anchor text.
6. Leverage social media to help get links tweets, or promoting specific pages with promotional offers and other incentives.

If you’ve been neglecting the deeper individual pages of your site, you can thank Google’s May Day for lighting a fire under your butt to give those pages some love.

As I look back over the last few months and consider the developers’ conferences for Twitter, Facebook and Google, when taken together with Apple’s iPad / iAd introductions, the first half of this year has been nothing short of breathtaking.

At the I|O Conference last week, Google made it abundantly clear it’s going after Apple (and many others), and that they’re all in for HTML5. It’s also clear Google is all in for TV by officially introducing Google TV. One last thing Google is all-in for is mobile, and announced a new Android OS.

One thing they don’t seem to care much about any more is search. That is, it would be easy to conclude that, since search per se didn’t come up once during the conference.

But it’s easy to see why all the things Google is all-in for plays into their core search strength. Before I elaborate on this point, however, consider some numbers:

• More than 100,000 Android-enabled devices are being sold every day, overtaking sales of the iPhone worldwide.

• While there are one billion computer users globally, there are two billion mobile users. And as more and more searches emanate from smart phones these days, its getting easier to imagine these outpacing computer-based searches.

• Moreover, there are four billion TV users around the world; in the U.S., folks spend, on average, five hours per day watching the old boob tube (that’s an old-timey term for TV, not porn.)

• According to Google, $70 billion is spent on television advertising in the United States alone.

So, yeah, it’s easy to see why Google is all about these other things: it all comes back to its core search advertising strengths. The embrace of HTML5 similarly plays to their core strength while also improving the prospects of another key Google priority: YouTube (the boob tube of the 21st century).

A key reason why HTML5 is a darling not only at Google, but also at Apple and Microsoft, is because the as yet un-ratified Web development language supports, among other things, video, graphics and audio. Which means search engine crawlers are now able to index all those bits of web sites that were formerly unindexable (like Flash animations or Flash-enabled video.) Moreover, because these bits can be tagged via HTML5, they can be indexed more accurately.

As search engine optimization pros struggle to understand how to optimize sites for Facebook’s Open Graph, which was announced only a few weeks ago, they must now also contend with migrating to HTML5 – fast. Those that lag might potentially see a diminution in search rank as more nimble sites make the transition faster.

And what about Google TV? First, watch the video. Then, consider all the ways in which Google might use its expertise in marrying just-in-time ads generated from its bidding platform with all the intentions we might express when doing searches (powered by the Android OS and the Chrome browser) via Google TV. Though I imagine they’re going to be more focused on Content Network-type advertising (potentially expanded to enable the just-in-time placement of interstitials in YouTube videos), there will likely also be appropriate ways to include text ads from AdWords.

Users will also be able to visit a favored Web site via Google TV and instantly turn that into a widget displayed on your TV screen, essentially creating a new TV channel that you can tune-in to any time. Add to that all the apps from Google’s app store that will accompany Google TV, and your TV will now go well beyond what your cable provider makes available.

Many of these apps have the potential of bringing social networking components to televised entertainment, such as HitPost, a social app focused on sporting events and which also provides the potential of highly targeted advertising. Advertisers of all stripes will have better targeting capabilities via multiple channels (both literally and figuratively) with much improved measurability.

For brands willing to serve as the early adopters of Google TV advertising opportunities, potentially big rewards – and pitfalls – await. In terms of HTML5, however, that’s a bandwagon all search marketers need to jump on sooner rather than later.  Web developers can get some information from the W3C site, the Standardista Blog and industry leaders are rushing to publish guidelines and materials (follow @HTML5Now on Twitter for regular updates.)

It’s been another big week in Silicon Valley. The annual Ad:Tech San Francisco Conference is wrapping up today after playing host to 12,000 visitors and a huge range of exhibitors anxious to show off the ways in which they’re innovating across traditional, online, search and mobile advertising.

At the same time, Facebook kicked off its Developers’ Conference, called F8, also in the Bay Area. Like Twitter’s conference last week, the gathering is for third-party developers of applications that live on Facebook itself and across its growing ecosystem. Founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured above, at the opening of F8 on April 21, 2010) announced a stunning array of changes and new initiatives that will directly affect the nearly 500 million people who visit the site each month.

But wait, there’s more: Google, Apple and Yahoo!, all headquartered in the Bay Area, released their quarterly earnings reports this week. And what earning they are:

Google, though disappointing analysts, saw revenue increases of more than 20% over the same period last year, bringing in a total of $6.7 billion, with profits of nearly $2 billion. (What’s to be disappointed about?) Search advertising remains the principal driver of Google’s revenues and profits.

Yahoo!, which everyone said was on a death watch, also produced respectable results for the quarter. Revenues were $1.6 billion for the first quarter of 2010, a one percent increase from the first quarter of 2009. Income from operations for the first quarter of 2010 was $188 million. Nearly all this was driven by display advertising across its network.

Not to be outdone, Apple also reported stunning results last quarter, which officially made it bigger in terms of market cap than cross-town rival Google. Total revenues for the quarter were nearly $15.7 billion, with profits at nearly $3.4 billion. They’re selling more Macintosh computers, iPhones and iPads than ever; only iPods saw a small decline in sales—about a one percent decline. Increasingly, however, Apple is deriving significant revenues from sales of apps, various forms of entertainment and advertising.

Reading this, you might ask “What recession?” While Silicon Valley did see some impact from the Great Recession, which most economists believe is now over, it wasn’t as adversely impacted as many other sectors of the economy. And its rebound is pretty darn impressive.

Capitalizing on the robust return to growth of online display, search and mobile advertising–not to mention the massive adoption of smart gadgets like the iPhone and iPad–Facebook is moving aggressively to expand its ecosystem across much of the Web. In summary, Facebook’s new default is “globally social” – which is to say, it presumes all members of the social network want to be social not only on Facebook but wherever it may have extended its tentacles across the Web.

For instance, if you see a “Like” button next to an article on, say Huffington Post, and you click on that button, your endorsement of that article will appear in your news feed on Facebook for all your friends to see, comment on and share. That this button exists at all on HuffPo has to do with Facebook’s new Open Graph effort, which provides website publishers with simple tools to integrate Facebook features and functions directly into their own sites.

This new initiatives also means that the HuffPo will be more personalized to you – showing you, for instance, what your friends on Facebook previously read and shared on HuffPo.

Like Google’s search advertising engine, AdWords, Facebook will target ads to its users. But instead of using the words typed into a search query to dictate what sort of text-based ads to serve around search results, Facebook will target ads that are mostly text but also include a small graphic based on what users have declared about themselves in their profiles and news updates. It will also factor in your age, location, gender, education, and other demographic, psychographic and geographic considerations.

Facebook believes it can help advertisers more precisely deliver ads that are directly relevant to the person who sees them. Moreover, it’s hoping that because users see ads that pertain to their immediate needs, interests or desires, they’ll be more receptive to those messages. All of which, of course, should lead to better ad click-through rates, increased sales, and lower costs to market products and services.

At Ad:Tech, all the buzz what less about the kinds of ads you might expect to find on networks like Yahoo’s or AOL’s new Advertising.com platform, which serves the AOL network, and more about how to integrate better into the interactions and conversations you might find on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. While advertising on networks is still big business, ad-buys on those properties are now a default in any ad plan. Everyone in the business is more interested in those 500 million monthly visitors to Facebook or the millions more who are publishing billions of tweets across Twitter’s network every day.

Another big topic is how best to leverage advertising on smart phones like the iPhone and Blackberry, and on tablet devices like the iPad – and how best to efficiently integrate advertising into the hundreds of thousands of apps people place on those devices.

Given the pace of technological innovation, you’d think the advertising models for all this new technology would be a little more advanced. But you’d be wrong. Seasoned pros and young entrepreneurs alike are struggling to find the right ways to best leverage the range of new advertising channels effectively and efficiently, and which also integrate well into the new experiences all this technology makes possible.

Whether leveraging mobile search to get relevant coupons and offers into the hands of those who’d use them right when they need them, to whether and how to place ads in apps like Condé Nast’s Epicurious such that they’re seen as helpful is still being hotly debated.

What is clear is that the future of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies remain pretty darn bright. Not to mention those earnings.