“The problem of our times, for the Advertising Community, is how to reach consumers with personalized advertisement and still maintain an affordable cost per lead” - a member of the audience

Ravi Kiran, CEO of Star Com Media Vest Group introduced Ibibo CEO Ashish Kashyap, informing the audience that ibibo reach a million subscribers yesterday. Earlier in the day, Ramamurthy Sivakumar, MD South Asia for Intel (NSDQ: INTC) disclosed that Indians now form the largest population on Orkut.

In a session that focused on user empowerment and the humanization of the web, Kashyap spoke about creating an ecosystem that has incremental advantage for its constituents; the issue is how companies commercialize the information that consumers put up on the web? And the user should be further empowered to choose if he wants to be more involved with the ecosystem (hinting at Ibibo’s scheme of paying bloggers to post…which I don’t agree with).  Esther Dyson, Chairperson of EDventure Holdings, disagreed - there have been cashback services in the past, but they never worked, and eventually morphed into spyware companies. Consumers aren’t impressed with payment systems for usage, and she doesn’t think they will. Responding to Kashyap’s suggesting of putting users in buckets in order to deal with privacy, she said that opting in needs to be individualized - as a user, I should be free choose when I want to opt in, and when I don’t. Users don’t choose to share info. The challenge in advertising: users want to be identified by some vendors (sites like dopplr.com which she uses), and others like want no relationships with others. Kashyap put the responsibility of protecting user data on the Industry: users don’t read terms and conditions, and protecting them will help create credibility for the Internet business. Dyson added that the Internet is more of a PR medium than an advertising medium; vendors might sponsor communities, instead of choosing in-your-face advertising.

Ravi Kiran also slammed Microsoft’s (NSDQ: MSFT) Desktop TV, which streams 30 second commercials online, as being intrusive. The user goes online to avoid those 30 second commercials; I concur - they start automatically, and leech the bandwidth. Ironic, that it’s a service from Microsoft, which created this ad.