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.
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)
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!!!
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*)
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
Display based advertising is so web 1.0. What’s hot now is connecting with consumers beyond traditional display ads through social media according to the panel at The Next Frontier: Advertising in Applications session.
Moderator:
Mark Naples, Managing Partner WIT Strategy Panelists:
Luis E Castaneda, Global Digital Marketing, Xcentuate LLC
Hooman Radfar, CEO and Co-Founder, Clearspring
Ira Rubenstein, Executive VP, Global Digital Media Group, Marvel Entertainment
Ben Pashman VP Sales and Business Development, Gigya
Social Media is Everywhere
Hooman Radfar kicked of the conversation asking “Is all media social? How do we integrate social features into all of our media?” People are social by nature. In the “real world” (ie. Offline) people are inherently social; web 2.0 is now enabling these social interactions to take place online. All online efforts should include the opportunity for consumers to interact with each other and the brand or content producer.
Measuring digital is hot right now and it was standing room only at the Media Boot Camp Power Session: Defining the New Media Currency – How to bring traditional media metrics online.
Moderator:
David Smith, CEO Mediasmith Panelists:
Jon Gibs VP Media Analytics, Nielson Online
Erin Hunter Executive VP, comScore
Young-Bean Song Director of Analytics & Atlas Institute, Microsoft
Scott Ernst President, Compete
Todd Teresi, Chief Revenue Officer, Quantcast
There is a pretty big delta between the amount of time, energy and engagement that people have online and the amount of money that marketers are spending online. One of the barriers is understanding how to track and measure online spending to show results.
Tuesday night at ad:tech San Francisco, the first night of the conference was filled with no less than eight parties. We didn’t make it to all of them but we did make it to the Tatto (no, that’s not a typo) Media party, the Oldtimers party and the end of the nigh blowout, Advertise.com party at Ruby Skye. From elegant cocktails to sloppy dance floor action, the night had something for everyone. If you were there, then you know. If you weren’t, well, there;s always the photos (here, here and here)
The biggest learning that came out of the ad:tech Omniture Sponsored Workshop: Close the Deal—Techniques and Technology That Will Increase Your Conversion Rates panel was a quote from Jupiter Research which stated, “Although only one third of the market is currently testing…79% of these companies have increased registration per visit, 74% have improved customers’ satisfaction and 68% have increased conversion rates.”
Larry runs a company called Duck9, which helps college kids improve their FICO scores. He also explains the premise behind (read: plugs the living dickens out of) his BusinessWeek column, What They Don’t Teach You At Stanford Business School.
Krista, never one to resist an opp to antagonize, loudly observes Larry never actually went to business school.
Witness with awe how a (too) smooth operator eases out of that snagglety-snaggle.
Being a contrarian, I opted to attend the “Know Thy Customer: Hard Data + Fresh Insights” while next door, the “UGC + Social Media” session with CNN and Facebook had a standing-room only crowd. This decision was based on how the session intended to address challenges facing a modern agency of continual optimization: 1) how to derive insights from data analysis; and 2) how to connect insights to decision making.
The panelists included the following:
- Cindy Roche, VP, Site Experience, TripAdvisor
- Janet Eden-Harris, VP of Web Intelligence, J.D. Power and Associates
- Emily Sawtell, Founder and Managing Director, GradeGuru.com
The main topics of panel was centered around three main ideas: how to understand the customer, always tests, and use analytics for more than measuring ROI. Indeed, taken together, they can be taken together as three steps involved in optimization.
Working at an agency, e-Storm International, with long and old digital roots - the issue of defining the modern agency is a personal one for me. In last year’s session, I found myself with more questions than answers…
What is a modern agency? How does analytics change the nature of agencies? How can an agency be effective when so much of media is now fragmented? Can you “just” be marketing or creative agency and be effective partner for the client?
The panel included a strong selection of diverse backgrounds and known players in the interactive space: Neo@Ogilvy, Enfatico, Agency.com and Crispin Porter + Bogusky. This year’s panel proved very illuminating. Discussions were not so much defining what the “Modern Agency” is, but rather the external forces that are forcing agencies to change:
- Analytics required part of a company’s DNA
- Analytics enables the measurement of “return of objective”, not just ROI
- Creative and media integration, also requires alignment with technology
- Challenge is more than integrating offline and online media, online media is the most fragmented media
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