David Verklin, Carat Americas CEO, gave his uniquely stamped vision of the future in his keynote address at the Retail Advertising Conference held in Chicago last month. A highly respected thought-leader among media and advertising professionals, Verklin has always been in the vanguard of the media industry, steering Carat through its ever-shifting waters beyond traditional approaches and towards innovative ways of communicating an advertiser's message. During this recent speech, Verklin offered his predictions and bright forecast for the future of the retail advertising industry.

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excerpted quotes from Verklin's speech

"My favorite retail future begins with a far more strategic use of online, digital advertising and the Internet - one in which the web site becomes the center and first point of contact of the marketing universe for many of you in this room. And the advertising, for many products, will be focused on driving prospective customers to that web site first."

"At Carat, we spend a lot of time helping our clients optimize the use of search engines. Did you know that search now accounts for over 40% of online media dollars? In April 2005, Forrester...stated that it believed search will command as much of advertising's budget as cable, satellite television, and radio by 2010. That may be an overstatement, but it's hard to overstate the impact of search."

"We manage many of our clients' participation in the online key word auctions of critical search terms that take place continuously throughout every day. We know how to ensure that search engines put our clients first; we know what our clients must do to achieve the search results that they need."

"In marketing, ladies an gentleman, this is a moment of aperture. And, in the advertising industry, we will be talking about this moment a lot in the months and years ahead. It's the same moment of aperture that drives guys to sell umbrellas outside subway exits in the rain - the right product, at the right time, marketed to a prospect with the right mind set. We are about to advertise to the interested."

"One developing area that fascinates me involves the use of cell phones not just for advertising but to make/pay for purchases as well. The technology already exists: a company called MobileLime has a service that sends text messages to authorize transactions; another technology known as the "digital wallet" authorizes credit card transactions by phone; a third, called "near field communications", uses an EZ Pass-like technology to charge purchases."

"We didn't adequately participate in the early days of the Internet, and, as a result, the initial approaches to online advertising failed - bursting the Internet bubble along the way. We have to learn from those mistakes, as we approach wireless, because it has even greater potential for advertising."

"Carat's research predicts that by 2020, 80% of all media will be digital, and a significant portion of that will be wireless. Make no mistake. This is a huge opportunity."

"We need to talk about how we are going to use the cell phone as a vehicle for commercial persuasion. And, in the coming months, we know that the carriers will want to be a more constructive part of that discussion, too. We suspect that they will soon discover that it's better to be part of the future at a lower price than to have the future bypass them, as it's now doing with cell phone transaction technology."