Watching the development of interactive marketing is “going to be like being there when television first came out,” marketing expert Phillip Buehler said to a group of 100 Iowa State students and faculty Wednesday night.

Buehler, whose clients include American Express, AT&T, Apple Computer and Ford, is the executive vice president and director of strategic planning at Wunderman Cato Johnson. Buehler was the keynote speaker for this year’s Ad Day.

Interactive marketing will be “a big chunk of the future,” Buehler said.

The strategic planning committee of Wunderman Cato Johnson met with panel experts to begin to understand changes in the Internet. Because committee members knew that technology’s effect on people can’t be predicted, they decided to study a mainstream Internet community, Buehler said.

Blacksburg Electronic Village, in Virginia, was the site of their study. BEV is the oldest Internet community with 65 percent of the city’s population having access to e-mail at home and 50 percent having home access to the World Wide Web, Buehler said. More than 100,000 e-mail messages are sent per day within the community and 250 of the 300 businesses of Blacksburg have a home page.

Buehler said it was found that on the Internet today, the question is not where you want to go, but whom you want to reach, and the people in electronic communities want to reach local businesses to take care of their daily needs.

“It’s a social phenomenon, not a technical phenomenon,” Buehler said. The Internet is bringing the Blacksburg community together by making communication so fast, easy and personal, he said.

The strong involvement of the Internet in this community has led to commerce through the wires, and this will be seen in more communities in the future, Buehler said.

On a large scale, the implications of this study on marketers is that “marketers must reach out and be reached by e-mail and be prepared for tremendous volumes of response,” Buehler said.

“People who don’t surf the Web every day will be more apt to go to a site if they have a personal message from a company,” he added.