Slow Balls and Fast pitches is AD:TECH’s version of speed dating.
Five companies each got five minutes to pitch to two tough judges.
As a reality show it combined elements of American Idol and The Apprentice
and just might get better ratings than does ABC on most nights.
The judges (Tom Beeby of Modem Media and Greg van den Dries) were
from the “tough but fair” school of judging. While not in the league of Simon or the Donald, they acquitted themselves well. The presenting companies (Dotomi, Quigo Technologies, Icon Media Labs, Studio One Networks and Oddcast) were earnest and grateful (at least in public) for the criticism. Some got critiqued for their presentatation, others for their product or service. Presumably the exposure to the somewhat sparse audience was worth the abuse.
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Here are the presentation notes for my “The New Social Web” presentation.
What Is the Social Web? It’s a range of “people-powered” online trends, the Internet 2.0, if you will, such as:
- Social Networks
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Moblogs
- Flash mobs
- Instant messaging plug-ins
- Craig’s List
- Meetup
- MoveOn
- And so on…
Our Panelists:
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Why weren’t more of you in this session? Sure, Lee Cooper’s presentation was relatively dry and bookish - he is, after all, a tenured professor who’s been on UCLA’s faculty for almost four decades - but it seems to me that this stuff is the real meat and potatoes of this conference. If you have what you think is the Next Big Thing, how do you persuade the rest of the world that you’re right?
Perhaps because of Cooper’s delivery, what audience there was thinned over the course of the hour, but it’s their loss. Regardless, Cooper did a good job of laying out his model for identifying the kernel of an innovation from a business perspective - not a technological perspective - and how to pick the right market to enter first so your innovation can not just survive but thrive.
Drawing on a wide array of historical examples - from bicycles and steam ships to Nolan Bushnell and Atari - Cooper overcame the challenges of speaking to a small and largely inattentive group of marketers to share one possible roadmap to success.
(A more complete partial transcript of this session is also available.)
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Cliff Kurtzman, CEO of Adastro, and Tim Smith, an independent investor and entrepreneur, spent their shared hour running through a wide-ranging list of trends and themes that they think will affect advertising and business online. While a lot of what they covered wasn’t overly new or noteworthy, two major topics piqued my interest.
Kurtzman touched on the idea that brands are no longer established by advertising, marketing or public relations. They’re established by every single step along the supply chain - every interaction with consumers. “It’s got to be delivered by service over time,” he said. In other words: Brands happen.
And Smith’s expansion on his story systems concept begs further consideration. Parallel to the HP keynote this morning, the best brands will be those whose consumers tell the best stories. The more organizations do to allow people to express themselves—in a way that further connects consumers with those companies—the more successful they will be.
What do you think? What stories could your company help people tell?
(A more complete partial transcript of this session is also available.)
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