Rain Washes Away Sins, Sessions End on Ambiguous Note

Like Wash Away Sins Bubblebath, the November rain of New York washed away all the debauchery and chaos from the nights and days before. Sitting, absorbing the awkwardness of New York's LaGuardia Airport, I filtered through the remaining morsels of ad:tech that I hadn't yet covered off.

Alan Kelly's "Elements of Influence" workshop closed out the end of Tuesday's sessions. Creating his own buzz word by substituting the phrase "playmaking" for strategy, Kelly launched into his science-saturated PowerPoint presentation. Kelly mentioned that he was a son of a cell biologist, and as the presentation continued, it became obvious. Kelly spent five years writing his book with a heavy social science foundation.

Breakthrough Technology Provides Self-Help Session

One of Tuesday's many sessions opened with a speckled attendance, as the previous day's energy and excitement took its toll. With just two scheduled panelists, the "Breakthrough Technology: Designing The Future" session played to the after-lunch crowd. Dave Evans from Digital Voodoo gave an anecdotal introduction. Evans explained that this session was about getting lost and finding your way back. Not quite making the nebulous connection between the anecdote and session title, the attendees did their best to understand.

Taking the stage next was Barbara Fittipaldi from the Center for New Futures. With many philosophical statements and aural overlays of the adjacent room's speaker, some of the crowd began to phase out while others continued to listen. Fittipaldi positioned a breakthrough as something that seems difficult, if not impossible, to reach. One of the attendees asked if the session defined a breakthrough as just another word for a goal. Fittipaldi explained that a major part of a "breakthrough" was making the possible, doable, while not being predictible.

Marketing Mashups: Navigating Consumer-Driven Marketing

"User-generated content." It's become a buzzword unto itself. Internet users embrace Snakes On A Plane. Beck and Janet Jackson encourage music fans to take their music and turn it into something else. Google Maps makes itself available so that programmers can layer it over something else entirely to create something new entirely.

But what's the motivation for users to generate all this content?

The top reason, according to session moderator Marissa Gluck, co-founder and Managing Partner of Radar Research, which investigated this exact question, is simply: for the fun of it. Rounding out the top five reasons users generate content: to hone technical skills, to create art, to amuse friends, and because they're fans.

Viral Marketing Sensitive to Nuances, Brands Skimming the Surface

Tuesday's "The Intricacies of a Great Viral or Word-of-Mouth Marketing Program" session provided an array of case studies from the client perspective. The panel consisted of various speakers who provided insight into how a client views a viral or word-of-mouth campaign. With a bit of plugging for WOMMA out of the way, the session began to take form.

Perhaps one of the more well-known viral campaigns presented was the Philips Shave Everywhere site that launched to an audience of 1.7+ million viewers to date. Zdenek Kratky, a Brand Manager for Philips Norelco, explained due to the project's low budget, word of mouth marketing came to the forefront as a possible tactic. They spent one year researching and developing this campaign. Despite listing sales goals in the project's objective, Philips decided to leverage organic word-of-mouth to influence their target audience. Once Kratky presented the site for the session attendees, it was easy to hear why this campaign was a success through the wave of giggles in the room.

Finding the Consumer Pathway

What do you track and how do you make it actionable? We're deluged with data, what do we do with it?

Moderator: Greg Smith, COO, Neo@ogilvy
Panelists: Alexandre Douzet, Co-Founder & VP of Marketing, TheLadders.com
Dion Sullivan, e-Commerce Marketing, Atom Entertainment/Shockwave.com
Matthew Roche, Founder & CEO, Offermatica
David Herscott, President, MEA Digital

What do you track and how do you make it actionable? We're deluged with data, what do we do with it? The panelists started with some presentations to illustrate what the problem is.

Linking and Optimization for Better Rankings and More Traffic

An intense session on how search engines work. Mike Grehan, "Global Search Marketing Nomad," wrote the first book on SEM and started with a series of bad joke. Bad jokes aside, it was a great dissection of how things work.

The most frequent question Grehan is asked is, "Can you help me get into top 10 of major search engines?" Why should you be? The answer is difficult, but he tried to cover the major points of SEM. He covered a lot of ground in this session. Here's what he talked about (sort of like the notes I took in class).

Social Commerce is King

First content was king. Then it was commerce. Then content again. So what happens when a community comes together to create content and the transactional web? Social commerce. This was the subject of Tuesday's session, "Social Commerce: Mashing up the Web," moderated by Stephen Dimarco, VP of Marketing and Client Services, Compete, Inc.

Using Mobile To Monetize Your Brand

Maybe the reason this session was so lightly attended (about 60% of the seats were filled) was that many people felt it would offer little new information relative to yesterday's standing-room-only Mobile Marketing 101 session. They were right.

Two key points noted yesterday were stressed again today: (1) Mobile should be viewed as just one piece of an overall integrated mobile marketing campaign, not as a stand-along channel. (2) The customers you're trying to reach are the carriers' customers, so you're working in a three-player ecosystem, not the usual two-player model.

What's on the horizon for mobile? Stephen Smyth, GM, Media, Americas, Reuters.com said that search on the handset is looking interesting, as are RSS applications. Jeff Janer, COO of Third Screen Media cited the rise of video applications, envisioning YouTube on the phone, while Nihal Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Ipsh! anticipated an advertiser trend away from SMS to WAP to WAP sites to Java apps on the handset itself.

Finally, a few financial tidbits to take away: CPMs for mobile campaigns have been pretty consistent in the last 18 months, ranging from $20-$50 . . . The average campaign, according to Mehta, is in the $50,000 to $200,000 range . . . In Japan, mobile marketing in 2006 amounts to about $3.80 per advertiser. In the U.S., it's less than a buck.

Tiny Technologies Aim Big at ad:tech

ad:tech's Now and Next Technology Showcase was filled with a collection of small, upstart companies that are providing niche and new products catering to the drastically changing media landscape. One company, adhoc mobile, works with content publishers, brands and mobile service providers to bring marketer's messaging to multiple mobile applications, text and games. Snapse has launched a video creation platform that provides people tools to draw from multiple online video sources in a streaming fashion to create real-time, custom videos. Marketers can create custom video vignettes which users of the service can integrate into their personally created videos. Believe me, it's way cooler than I'm describing it.

Models to Make Your Head Spin

With the title "Agent-Based Modeling Workshop: Simulations: The Future of Marketing & Media Mix Planning," I should have known that I was getting into an academic discussion.

Agent based modeling (ABM), for the uninitiated, is a computer-based tool that will help you better plan. This is how Peter Storck, Presiden of Points North Group, laid the landscape on a very esoteric topic, but apparently pragmatic approach to marketing. This is the same approach taken to for military simulations and predicting the path of communicable diseases. So why not use complexity science for marketing?

Looking into the Crystal Ball

It is rare that a session on "The Future of Advertising" actually yields useful insight. Fortunately, Tuesday's panel on this very topic was one of the best in recent memory. Perhaps it has something to do with the all-star cast: Ted McConnell, Interactive Innovation Director of P&G, Stuart Elliot, Columnist with the New York Times, David Rosenblatt, CEO of Doubleclick and Peter Naylor, SVP Media Sales for NBC Universal, all moderated by Drew Ianni. And perhaps it is also due to the fact that these speakers raised more questions about dealing with our legacy systems than they proffered predictions.

Pay Per Click Search Marketing Insights

For this paid search session, the best nuggets come in the form of data points from Hitwise's Bill Tancer.

He started by reviewing findings from its white paper released earlier this year. He said that more than 75% of top 100 search terms driving traffic to all sites are brand or navigational. Bands that are proactively monitoring their brand in search receive upward of 85% of traffic from brands.

Latest Trends in Email Marketing

Perhaps the most interesting current trend in email marketing is something that's not happening: companies are not looking at email holistically, as part of an overall communications strategy to their customers. Multiple departments in a company may well be sending email to a given customer, but there's no one managing the communications from a customer's point of view.

"The word strategic is not there," observed Paul Beck, Senior Partner and Executive Director of Interactive Marketing and Advertising at OgilvyInteractive, Worldwide.

Navigating the Current of Participatory Communication

On Tuesday, I attended a lunch presentation by Ed Dilworth of Campbell-Ewald which turned out to be an interesting view of what's going on with today's proliferation of media choices.

Dilworth started by saying that everything's turned sideways now. People are coming into sites sideways from links, not from the home page. It's all nonlinear. You've got to plan for this. GM's Fastlane Blog is a way for GM to converse with consumers--and often a lot of things are said that are "not so nice". "Starwood Aloft" in Second Life is giving the hotel chain the chance to test concepts with consumers before building them. Peter Jackson put the filmmaking of King Kong online and tried to convert The Lord of the Rings fanbase to King Kong. The Lord of the Rings was "closed" with production top secret. King Kong was "open. Borat: grossed $26 million in its opening weekend at 1,000 theaters--the biggest 1,000 theater opening ever. The cast did a 20 city tour with MySpace people and did a lot on YouTube. In content/gaming, the Navy's Strike & Retrieve game was a way to evaluate potential recruits and allow them to experience what it's like to be in the Navy. The Folgers manhole cover campaign ran for 2 hours, McDonald's sundial was 1 billboard: both got enormous visibility online. Costco is a $17.5B company spends nothing on marketing. It's an interesting twist, a radical departure from the idea of traditional media campaigns.

eBay's Take on Auction Based Media

There were a bunch of great panelists on the panel, "The Move to Auction-Based Media and the Demise of the Upfront," but Howard Rosenberg, Director of Private Marketplaces at eBay, kept providing the most concise, cutting takes, so you can get the gist of the discussion by reviewing Howard's take.

Here's Howard:

Auction based media is "all driven by what people do with the platform... Here's a marketplace. Use it to create the most value for yourself."

As for the marketplace: "It's not going to be bad for anybody." He noted that any marketplace that operates in the best interest of all its constituents can't be a total failure. If it works, everyone will benefit.

How Hot Can It Get? M&A

The tradeshow floor is hotter than a bikram yoga session (in more than one sense), but does this mean we are in an overheated market? How many "we are just like YouTube" pitches can the industry support? Are we on the edge of a cliff, about to plummet again?

These are some of the questions Jay Weintrob, Director of Corporate Strategy for Oversee.net, Clif Kurtzman, Ph.D., CEO of ADASTRO Inc. and Bill Morrison, Director, Senior Research Analyst of JMP Securities LLC. attempted to answer in the ad:tech New York 06 session "The Economics of Interactive: Industry Investment and M&A for Fun and Profit."

Boob Tube vs. YouTube

The Monday afternoon panel "ARF Session: Online Advertising Industry's Definitive Advertising Playbook," moderated by the ever-engaging Taddy Hall, took a little time to get going, but the audience participation (thanks, Doron Wesly) spiced things up. Doron pressed to find out why panelists weren't doing more to take advantage of online advertising, and then another audience member popped a lot of the air out of the collective balloon dismissing the online experience as nowhere near as compelling as TV.

Web 2.0: Predictions and Pithy Analysis

In this discussion, panelists from Nielsen/NetRatings and from an adserving company discussed Web 2.0 and its place in the world of online advertising.

Moderator: Geoff Ramsey, eMarketer
Panelists: Roy deSouza, CEO, ZEDO, Inc
Charles Buchwalter, Sr. VP Industry Solutions, Nielsen/NetRatings

What is Web 2.0? Somebody suggested "when community meets e-commerce". According to Roy deSouza, Web 1.0 was sites that were content- and editorial-driven. Builders knew best. We were talking about websites like print: build them and expect people to look at them.

Math, and A Bit of Common Sense

The Monday afternoon session, "Technology Visionaries Sound Off" kicked off with a frightening realization: I should have taken more math classes. (I opted for propositional logic.) According to moderator David Scott Carlick, MD Vantage Point Venture Partners, the marketing holy grail has evolved from hitting a demographic (math), to hitting a CPA (more math) and finally to hitting a CPW (Cost per Whatever). CPW requires an understanding of all of the above, and therefore, involves a heck of a lot of math.

Digital Media Innovators

This panel focused on where we're going in terms of the growing importance of digital in the media mix. Three agency executives and one network exec weighed in on their vision of where things are going.

Mobile Marketing 101

"As marketers, it's time for us to give something back. It's about cooperation with customers. It's about delivering something of value to the customer, not just delivering an ad."

That, to paraphrase the collective contributions of all the panelists, was the encouraging and valuable takeaway of this session, which promised to tell attendees "How to Integrate Mobile Into Your Media Campaigns." Indeed, mobile marketers absolutely need to look at their efforts from the customer's point of view: One of Mobile Marketing Association Executive Director Laura Marriott's presentation slides indicated that anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of those customers (depending on the age group) are not at all interested in receiving mobile marketing messages. Not. At. All.

Whatcha Gonna Do ...

... when the world of ad networks runs wild on you?

The title of the session - "Grudge Match: Ad Network Smack Down" - promised online marketing as contact sport. With seven participants on stage, it even had the potential to be more of a battle royal than a grudge match.

As with pro wrestling itself, though, much of the session was dedicated to self-promotion. Unavoidable, I suppose, with almost half the time spent on introductions and on the panel answering the burning questions:"What's the best type of client for your company? What's the sweet spot for your company?"

Not that some important issues weren't touched on. Clearly there are plenty of issues and concerns that ought to be top of mind when dealing with ad networks. Here are three:

Ads are sometimes delivered to inappropriate sites, which can pose a significant risk depending on the advertiser. This is a problem that can be minimized through better technology, perhaps, but as Jim Meskauskas, VP Online Media for ICON International pointed out, being 100 percent risk-averse means you do nothing.

From the publishers' side, a significant level of ad inventory (25% according to one audience questioner) potentially gets lost in the daisy chain of one network handing off to another network handing off to another network handing off to another network before a link in the chain is broken and an ad is never delivered. Improvements lie on both sides of the equation: Publishers need to demand greater ad serving accountability, while networks need to improve their overall serving and reporting technology.

There are too many of them. Most of the panel felt consolidation is coming, though Dave Morgan, Founder and Chairman of TACODA, suggested there will be many more networks before there are fewer. David Yovanno, General Manager of ValueClick Media, countered that consolidation facilitated by clients is already happening, and that the market will continue to consolidate.

When all was said and done, the big takeaway was that dealing with ad networks is still a pretty messy business with a lot of problems and a fluid future. Appropriately, like most pro wrestling matches, the discussion settled nothing - but promised plenty of action in the weeks, months, and years to come.

Brands Dip Their Feet in Social Strategy, Superfans

After some much needed coffee and the delegate lunch that left a bit to be desired, I meandered my way through the sea of logos, flyers, and marketers to the "Why You Should Create a Corporate Social Media Platform - Incorporating Community, Blogs, Podcasts and WIKIs into Your Customer Interaction" session. Admittedly a bit skeptical about the term corporate, the session provided insight to how brands are viewing social strategy, for better or worse.

Engagement Panel Du Jour

There was one fundamental flaw about this standing room only session: it was all about engagement.

"Consumer-Genered Media's Role in the Engagement Equation"
Monday November 6 11:15am
Pete Blackshaw, Chief Marketing and Client Satisfaction Officer, Nielsen BuzzMetrics (Moderator)
Terry Pittman, Executive Director, Consumer Insights and Innovation Frameworks, AOL Digital Services
Jonah Peretti, Founding Partner, Huffington Post
Bob DeSena, Managing Partner, Director, Active Engagement, Mediaedge:cia
Ze Frank, Founder, ZeFrank.com

It was another great session with brilliant people talking about a nebulous term that left me no better versed in engagement, a term that we can stop talking about as of this show. It's great to talk about engaging consumers (with the verb) or engaging experiences (with the adjective), but we need to kill the noun, engagement. Maybe we can get a petition going for future shows.

I don't mean to be so negative. The panelists themselves were pretty cynical about it. Some choice soundbites from the session are quoted below. I haven't included the multiple football analogies (that's why you need to spring for the ticket to the show).