With recent news that Yahoo! has hired Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for ad duties and recent TV ads for web firms including Google and Microsoft Bing, The Barbarian Group’s Rick Webb posits a “slide of faith” theory: that an Internet company’s belief in the power of traditional advertising is inversely proportional to its growth rate in users.

Matt Howell, chief interactive officer at Modernista!, spoke at Boards Presents Boulder Digital Works in Toronto about the painful process of modernizing an ad agency to better reflect the digital landscape. Drawing upon his own experiences, he argues in this op-ed that if restructuring feels comfortable or easy, your agency is probably in for a very bad year.

What can American ad agencies learn from Nokia’s traveling sideshows in rural India? The live show should be as good as (if not better than) the commercial, explains Max Lenderman, director of Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s experiential division OuterActive.

Rob Ford, founder and principal of theFWA.com picks five of the coolest websites from the past month, including the first person thriller game Bank Run, a beautiful illustrated site for French toymaker Djeco, a gritty e-commerce experience for Black Sunshine Coffee, photographer Jean Malek’s portfolio and If I Can Dream, a ‘post-reality’ web series by Poke, New York.

In this column for Boards, The Barbarian Group COO Rick Webb chews over Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ address about iAds, the computer giant’s new mobile advertising platform that aims to bring richer, more emotional ads to mobile phones.

As Apple’s highly-anticipated iPad hits store shelves this week, Geraint Owen, co-founder/EP of design and production studio Superfad, explains how designers can use the device to help traditional media outlets become the new ‘Curators of the Internet’.

Brands need to become cultural artifacts rather than existing in vacuumed silos or categories, argues Colin Drummond, head of Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s cultural and business insights. Nicknamed “Cogs”, short for cultural anthropologists, the department is a 30-strong team of social scientists, account planners and investigative journalists that take the place of traditional account planners.

As the techies leave town and the music industry invades Austin, first-time SXSW Interactive attendee and technical writer Adam Trujillo recounts his experiences inside a few interactive-minded seminars.

Websites are a long-term proposition, a marketing channel, not a project. The Barbarian Group’s COO Rick Webb argues that a branded web presence is crucial, and brands need to spend the time and money to develop websites rather than outsource to social networking sites like Facebook.

Damon Webster, executive producer at creative production firm Bullet, is a certified festival-goer. He’s attended the Cannes Lions for the past 12 years and starting Friday, he’ll spend a week in Austin photographing and attending panels and concerts at the annual SXSW Interactive conference and music festival. In this column for Boards, the veteran ad producer examines each event’s relevance for forward-thinking ad folks.