Participants stressed that advertising in the digital age is evolving rapidly, and no one can know that what works today will work tomorrow or with different audiences and products.

What’s clear is that the Internet has changed the nature of an ad agency’s work and, despite daily click-through reports, can make the audience opaque to advertisers.

In another session, Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, proposes a Bill of Rights for online advertisers.

The digital age makes effective advertising a two-way conversation, but the market reach and pricing power of companies like Google can run roughshod over advertisers.

Edelman’s proposed Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers includes:
 

• An advertiser’s right to know where its ads are shown.
  
  
• An advertiser’s right to meaningful, itemized billing.
  
  
• An advertiser’s right to use its data as it sees fit, including retrieval and data portability.
  
  
• An advertiser’s right to enjoy the fruits of its advertising campaigns because in behavioral targeting, a network can later resell a user to an advertiser’s direct competitor.
  
  
• An advertiser’s right to resolve disputes fairly and transparently.