What are advertisers thinking? Or tearing their hair about? The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is a body of more than 350 members, and this includes all the brand names that advertise nationally and globally.

Of about twenty committees, almost all of them list as ‘prevalent topics’ things like media and audience measurement, ROI, Integrated Marketing Communications, optimization, addressable TV, and PVR’s (personal video recorders.)

As can be expected, the ‘advertising’ committee and the ‘new technologies’ committee appear very keen on the issues of audience measurement, optimization, and TiVo. So if you were to read between the bullet points, you can see that the migration of advertising from the mainstream media to online opens up a lot of concerns, and a brand new set of needs.

I thought it was interesting that while TiVo was mentioned many times, another brand that is causing a lot of ripples in Madison Avenue and Hollywood was not mentioned: iTunes. Nor was YouTube, or MySpace. Hmmm.

But that is not to say they are not concerned. I clicked around and found that the new tech committee is in fact keeping an open ear for how other brands –I mean issues— such as Google, AOL, and Novartis can shed some light. The latter does not have a migraine-inducing ‘platform’ like PVRs or RSS, but the ANA was interested in the use of an ‘advergame’ called Zone Quest. In case you are wondering, Zone Quest is described as “a fun way to remind you of the importance of making healthy lifestyle choices to keep your blood pressure ‘in the zone’.”

Why am I interested in this? I come across tons of stories that deal with how poorly advertisers are responding to the emerging media, and how unprepared they are to meet the onslaught of the technologies arriving every day that circumvent advertising. They are indeed turning the ship around, allocating large portions of theie media budgets to online strategies. They are quite miffed by TV, and are ‘very dissatisfied’ with upfronts. This was from a survey of ANA members in 2004.

Imagine what they must think two years later…