PaidContent's interview with Jean-Philippe Maheu, Chief Digital Officer at Ogilvy, has lots of interesting stuff in it - such as the fact that Ogilvy no longer has a "digital" department, but instead adds digital to "everything we do". But I was particularly taken by this:

Marrying search with storytelling: Digital advertising has largely been focused on search, while traditional advertising has been about condensing a narrative about a product into a 30-second TV commercial, a page in a magazine or newspaper, or a billboard. Among Maheu's goals when he took the job at Ogilvy last year was to bring the art of storytelling to interactive advertising: "One of the key things we're working on is how to engage with Yahoo, Google and MSN in a way that is creative, unique and that is a bit more strategic than just buying media."

The notion of "telling stories" through advertising seems to me to be fundamental to the business of selling stuff to people. And it seems it must be particularly hard to do through search advertising (so why are Ogilvy only talking to GYM about it?). Advertising through "social media" seems to be all about telling stories. Which is maybe why Bebo went for as much as it did.