However, the most impressive part of the morning was a presentation by Joshua Novick, CEO of I-Network, on the planning and execution of online campaigns in Latin America. Novick's entire lecture was fascinating, but two of the points hit home throughout the Latin American region.

His first assertion was that online branding in Latin America has not been, and may never be, as successful as it has been in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. Novick insisted that branding cannot be done just online, but must be a combination of offline and online efforts. He went on to say that in most areas of Latin America, those where the Internet explosion is growing the most, there are not enough avenues of offline branding opportunities to make much of a difference. Those that are choosing to brand solely online have run into problems with finding suitable Web sites that are compatible to the message they are attempting to send. Novick says there are just not enough quality, targeted sites in Latin America, but that is quickly changing.

Novick stressed just how imperative the online media component has been in Latin America. He pointed to research that suggests that close to 30 percent of all advertising done on Latin American sites belong to online media - much of that belonging to the major portals in the region. Those online media outlets generally have two agendas: attract and register users.

Novick used Latin American portal and email provider UOL as his chief case study. He said that UOL does extensive advertising in the region, not so much to brand itself but to find users and to register them for all of UOL's services. Novick said that almost 75 percent of Latin American users have more than one email account, and UOL's free service makes up a great portion of that percentage.