San Francisco ad:tech Offers Up Optimism in the Face of Pessimism
With 12,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors, 125 press, 250 speakers, 63 sessions, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Rose, Steve Hayden, Jason Kilar, a separate contextual ad conference AdSpace, an SMX track and no less that 20 parties, ad:tech San Francisco, like ad:tech New York, kicked the recession squarely in the ass.
If you somehow missed the conference, be sure read the posts here on the ad:tech blog and watch David Spark’s spectacularly informative videos which capture the essence of the show. And don’t forget the party pictures too.
The next domestic conference will take place September 1-2 in Chicago. Be sure to follow @adtech on Twitter so you don’t miss a thing.
read more...Multi-Click Attribution: Tracking the Way Conversions Actually Happen
Interactive marketing has long sold itself on the promise of accountability and ROI measurement. Yet, at the same time there continues to be challenges in solving John Wanamaker’s problem: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Indeed, the common analytics tracking for online marketing campaigns are simplistic at best. It cannot measure how display ads (seen as branding) can impact search (used mostly for sales). Nor can most analytics tracking attribute the multiple searches and visits a person did that ultimately led to a purchase (See image above).
Enter Havas Digital and Yahoo. Their panel, Search + Display—Moving Beyond the Brand vs. Direct Response Model, not only showcased Havas Digital’s solution to this question but show great case studies of the insight and optimizations gained from a better and more true multi-channel analytics. (Note: all of the images in this post was taken by the Havas Digita/Yahoo PowerPoint presented at ad:tech)
read more...
Interview with Julian Brass, CEO of Notable.TV
Julian Brass of Notable.TV hosted a killer party at the ad:tech conference and I had the pleasure of interviewing him to learn more about Notable. Notable is a resource for everything Notable - it isn’t just a listing of all of the events in a city - it highlights the most “notable” things happening. Be sure to check it out.
Don’t take my word for it - check out the Video where Julian describes Notable as well as some exciting news - a deal with the Olympics!!!
Ad:tech Interview with Julian Brass, CEO Notable.TV from Krista Neher on Vimeo.
Making Mobile Marketing Work
Mobile is quickly becoming a must-have component of marketing campaigns. The panel on Capturing Direct Response in Mobile Media: Entertainment and Publishing shared strong insights into mobile marketing and provided examples highlighting how to create a successful campaign.
Moderator:
Mark Donovan Senior VP of Mobile, Comscore
Panel:
Chip Canter VP Wireless Platform Development, NBC Universal Digital Distribution
Cheryl Lucanegro, Senior VP Advertising and Sales, Pandora
Niles Lichtenstein Director, Mobile Strategy and Integration, Ansible Mobile
What Are the Issues Facing Mobile?
Sharing some stats, of the companies with mobile currently in their media mix, all plan to continue. Of the companies which have never done mobile, 60 percent plan to include it. There is a barrier to entry in mobile marketing, however once a brand tries it they want to do it again.
Inventory is no longer the issue in mobile the two key barriers are the immaturity of the infrastructure and training.
read more...
Has “The Year of Mobile” Finally Arrived?
This panel seemed to think so. The Future of Mobile: Adding Mobile to the Mix shared some great insights on how brands can effectively integrate mobile into marketing efforts.
Moderator:
Mickey Alam Khan Editor-in-Chief, Mobile Marketer Magazine
Panelists:
Sophia Stuart Executive Director, Mobile Hearst Magazines Digital Media
Tony Nethercutt VP of Sales, AdMob
Marcus Startzel – Senior VP of Sales,, Millennial Media
Mike Becker Executive VP of Business Development, iLoop
Matthew Valleskey Head of Marketing Communications for Mobile Services, NeuStar
David Katz, VP, Mobile Advertising and Publishing, Yahoo! Inc.
Quality vs. Quanitity
Marketers are used to mass marketing where reach is king. The focus of traditional advertising was heavy on the top of the funnel - “How many people am I reaching?”. Both the internet and mobile allow marketers to target in more meaningful ways and focus on reaching highly relevant audiences with the right message at the right time. This can result in better overall ROI by attaining higher conversion rates from a smaller audience vs. traditional mass marketing.
read more...
Levi’s Blueprint for Storytelling
“When presented with bold new ideas, people reference what they know more than what they can conceive.”
Senior Director Michael Perman of Levi’s passed us oranges, recounted memories of his dad and deluged us with blue-jean trivia in an ad:tech sesh entitled “The Power of Storytelling.”
See snippets of tweet coverage. It’s apt that Levi’s give us the skinny on storytelling’s underrated appeal, given that its capacity to spin tales has beguiled us for years. Anyway, here’s some videographic deja vu.
read more...Steve Hayden Replaces Industry Fear with a Wee Bit O’ Wonder
Ogilvy Vice Chairman Steve Hayden conducted a keynote titled “Fear, Love and Advertising” at ad:tech SF last week. I livetweeted it; you can see some of the tweetage here.
Hayden kicked off by explaining the premise behind his talk: in this dire economic clime, when everybody’s castrating their own creativity, he hopes to encourage the industry to shelf their fears in favour of a little (well-informed) wonder.
He woke the muse by blasting us with iconic ads, like the Apple Newton stuff and “True Colors” from Dove’s Real Women campaign.
Then he gave us a long, colourful explanation of a hexagon he calls Hayden’s Mandala—a complex (and yet simple!) cycle of everything a person/brand goes through when facing a major growth trajectory or change. Here’s a video snapshot of that:
Then Hayden did something I’ve never seen a keynoter do before: he passed the floor to people whose products he thinks will change the media environment. I was awestruck, and only more so when I saw what came next.
read more...Hashing Out Social Networking’s Impact on Photo Storage
The stuff that comes out after an interview is sometimes just as good as what you get during. After our audiovisual taste of the future of HootSuite (and a power-fail story about ZipCar), founder Ryan Holmes of Invoke Media and publisher Krista Neher of The Marketess riffed on the photo storage merits of Facebook and flickr.
Compelling factoid: while it may be true that flickr hosts over three million photos, the unlikely Facebook totally pwns that figure. As of October 2008 Facebook became the largest online photo storage site—clocking over 10 billion pics and counting.
read more...SEO Tactics for Every Flavor: Mobile, Local, and Video Search
Today’s search landscape shifting beyond doing using SEO to optimize for your text-based websites for people doing searches on their desktop browser. In the era of search anywhere via mobile and where even your grandparents are sending you YouTube videos, it’s a changed landscape for SEO as well. Partnering with the SMX conference series, well known for covering the search marketing space, ad:tech hosted some great panelists on the topics of SEO for mobile, local and video search which introduced the audience to very actionable and tactical information you could implement right away.
MODERATOR:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, SearchEngineLand.com
PRESENTERS:
Cindy Krum, CEO, Rank-Mobile, LLC
Matt McGee, Assignment Editor, SearchEngineLand.com
Drew Hubbard, Senior Linking Analyst, SEO, The Search Agency
Cindy Krum on Mobile SEO
Cindy Krum kicked off the session by introducing the audience to SEO for mobile users. While traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo are available on phones, marketers do need to tweak their SEO campaigns for to more specifically target the mobile user.
Big Parties, Small Parties, Dinners Add to ad:tech Experience
If one could identify a trend in parties at this year’s ad:tech in San Francisco, it would be this; more, smaller and no open bar. It all makes perfect sense in a “down economy.” Excepting a couple of parties, most were small events held at small venues with limited or no open bar. That didn’t seem to stop people from having fun though this year.
As early as Monday night, the eve of ad:tech, Glam Interactive held a small event atop the Clift Hotel in the Spanish Suite. From 7P-9P, members and guests mixed and mingled before the general ad:tech crowed began to glow in. While it was open to all, it never really got all that busy.
Invoke’s Ryan Holmes Demonstrates Serious Interviewing Fortitude
Forget, for a second, about the vacuumy café noises and the girl with the crutches in the background. The weather is pretty, Schoggi is cozy and we have pistachio and rosewater macaroons.
Fun fact: Founder/CEO Ryan Holmes of Invoke Media, parent company of HootSuite, has never had a macaroon before. When I ordered them at the register, he asked if they were “Asian hamburgers.” And then I died.
Notes on this video:
1. HootSuite is one of the cooler tools available to marketers on Twitter right now. It has a proprietary URL shortening feature (ow.ly) with a built-in ad and revenue sharing model. HootSuite can also manage multiple accounts at once.
An update, slated for the near future, will boast still more features and turn the HootSuite UI into a cross between Firefox (with tabs!) and TweetDeck. Yeah, that sounds scary, but Ryan assures me they’ve got good info architecture/usability peeps back at Invoke.
I believe everything he says. EVERYTHING.
read more...Amielle Lake on Mobile Marketing, (Copper) Mining and Pinot-Friendly Cheese
Amielle Lake is the CEO of Tagga, a Vancouver-based company that helps agencies add a strategic mobile component to their campaigns. (Think broad SMS efforts, mobile websites, etc).
The service—currently live in Canada and the US—includes reporting and dashboard management, and payment models are flexy.
We sat down yesterday to talk about Tagga in a video interview. As luck would have it, I ended up gleaning a lot more than I expected. Amielle tells this great story about Tagga’s birth and the state of agencies at that time; it also turns out she worked in mining and knows French cheese like this. (*crosses fingers*)
read more...ADSPACE Workshop Series - Contextual Advertising The ad:tech Way
Still relying on image and text ads to drive online traffic? Wish you could pre-sell the consumer before they clicked on the ad and you were charged? Wondering how mobile ads can actually increase your conversion rate? You should have gone to ADSPACE, the first ever contextual advertising conference and expo located within ad:tech San Francisco this year.
During a series of workshops held during the one day event, experts and business owners of the latest and greatest technologies now being introduced to the public shared their secrets to how to increase your conversion rate without having to sacrifice costs. Best of all, they did it using new forms of contextual ads available for mobile and the web!
Workshop Series: Emerging Platforms
Moderator:
Josh McFarland, Entrepreneur in Residence, Greylock Ventures
Panelists:
Mani Iyer: CEO and Founder, Kwanzoo Inc.
Steen Andersson, Co-Founder and VP, Marketing, 5th Finger
First up was Mani Iver from Kwanzoo Inc. Their company specializes in widget advertising. Now some of you might have the wrong idea by the term widget. All that means is that it acts as an interactive feature of some sort. This isn’t just a flash movie or roll-out banner, but a way to help you pre-qualify your customer not only before they reach the purchase page, but before you’re even charged for the click.
read more...Targeted Ads for Television: As Elusive As It Ever Was
One of the interesting aspect of the “digitalization” of media is “traditional” media slow movement to become more trackable and targetable. Televisions, the grand-daddy of all mass media, is one of them. The “TV 3.0: Reach + Targetability” session covered this very topic. Unfortunately, the holy grail of targetable television has proven as elusive as the actual Holy Grail. From the case studies presented, we seem no closer to targetable television advertising than from what I saw from last year’s ad:tech session on the same topic.
MODERATOR:
Daisy Whitney, Host/New Media Minute and Reporter, TVWeek
PANELISTS:
Mitchell Oscar, Executive VP, Televisual Applications, MPG
Joshua Herman, Digital Marketing Innovation Leader, Acxiom
Davina Kent, Director of Strategic Alliances, Comcast Spotlight
read more...
