Over $112 billion of U.S. ad spending is wasted, says Greg Stuart, former CEO and president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, opening the two-day Future of Online Advertising conference in New York: “This is a problem. Here’s what needs to happen.” Stuart has also authored a book on the situation, What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails And How To Guarantee Yours Succeeds.

He quoted ad man/TV host Donny Deutsch on the Super Bowl spot his agency did for Gallant. At the end of the commercial, the message told consumers to go to “seewhathappens.com” Deutsch said: “We got 600,000 clicks. We told the client it was great so it was great. [Nervous laughter].” This is meant to illustrate the lack of understanding of what online ads are meant to achieve and what constitutes success.

“There’s a new medium coming every seven years – millions of households have networking games, 130 million have portable wireless devices, 12 percent of us have an MP3 player. There’s so many choices.  What is a marketer to do?” Stuart asks rhetorically and then offers some bullet points:

-- Universal agreement of goals: When I was at the IAB, I put together an advertising campaign for the industry. The account teams and the research teams met, and no one could agree on what the campaign was supposed to accomplish.

-- Have a Plan B: Expect that things are going to go wrong and have something to fall back on.

-- Understanding Value: Know the value of each dollar in all the separate mediums.

The one thing he wants the audience to take away from his talk is this point: “Online advertising must pass the glance test—I must be able to look at something and get it within two seconds. It’s not that different from advertising in any other medium. But it’s more crucial when it comes to online, because of all the choices available to users, immediacy is a must.”