Brian Monahan Advertising Week Video: Online Ads & Peak Media (VIDEO)

Following his panel on "Making Online Ads the Topic of Cocktail Conversations," MAGNAGLOBAL's EVP and Managing Partner, Intelligence Practice Brian Monahan sat with AOL at BB King's to expand on his thoughts about online ads as content and the idea of Peak Media (Monahan also blogged about Peak Media for HuffPost).

"By any measure that we look at -- we look at media device ownership, we look at time spend wtih media, you look at the number of advertising lode that a person's exposed to on a daily basis -- we just see it going up and up and up and up," Monahan said. "We're really just seeing consumers leading mediated lives. There's no dead zones in people's live, and for brands that are trying to connect...how do you connect with the consumer amidst all that noise?"

Monahan said that "finding new user experiences, new ways of targeting them and new ways of measuring them are absolutely critical in this age of Peak Media."

"Americans spend more time with media than they do sleeping or working," he added.

What this means, Monahan says, is that brands need to break through the media clutter with more engaging content.

"We can't even figure out a methodology to figure out where this would end," he said. "Advertising-to-sales ratios are not going up, so budgets have to find a way to connect amidst all this noise. We're either going to see a serious devaluation of the CPM, or the smart money is going to get really smart at how to break through and connect with people."

Monahan says that he hears a lot of interest around ad targeting, but he also hopes that the industry will pay attention to the user experience so that "when we do reach the right person, [we present] them with something that's cool and interesting and, ultimately, emotionally moving."