Over on Madison Avenue Journal, Levenson and Hill New Media and Marketing Strategist Paul McEnany has written an article that discusses the rise of social media and the increase in consumer control over media which, when combined, has had a tremendous effect of the pillar of traditional advertising. While highlighting ad:tech San Francisco sessions that cover aspects of this discussion, Paul urges us to stop thinking about what we do as advertising and he’s right. Advertising is shouting a message at people. Clearly, the power of that model as quickly losing its luster.
With people’s increased connectivity and control over what they consume, marketers are finding it very difficult to “herd” demographic groups together to advertise to as easily as they once could. It started with media fragmentation. Remember when we thought 100 cable channels was a lot? And it continued with the growth of the Internet and the most recent explosion of social media which has absolutely changed the advertising equation. It’s far from the one way street it used to be.
While it’s unclear whether the current notion of conversations and conversational marketing will ever be fully adopted, it’s very clear people are communicating and consuming media in a far different manner than they were as little as ten years ago. It is the challenge of marketers to dive deep into this muck, get dirty and rise to the surface with new means of communication. We don’t have all the answers. We never will. But we can admit the old ways are gone forever and work together towards a new model whatever that may be.
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Dear ad:tech Delegates and Friends,
In my last post, I ended by talking about the emergence of the “marketing maelstrom”. I came across the definition of maelstrom the other day and it seemed to accurately describe the environment we all find ourselves in.
mael st rom (n): A powerful, often violent whirlpool, increasingly sucking in objects within a given radius..
As I travel across the country and around the world, I have found that an increasing number of our digital colleagues across the planet are feeling as though they are caught up in this maelstrom and I would argue that its force is growing stronger (insert Star Wars metaphor here) and its radius of effect continues to expand. From my perspective, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the business of media and marketing communications that is not feeling the impact of the digital revolution.
This, in my opinion, also makes it a great time to be in the business we are in. And to have a bit of an impact on the conversation as we do here at ad:tech is also a thrill because things are changing so fast and no one truly knows the answers. We all stand at the edge where one merger announcement, one press release, one product announcement can fundamentally alter the state of our business.
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Launched today as part of its ad:tech Awards event, ad:tech has added the People’s Choice Awards. Everyone in the advertising industry is invited to vote on finalists in ten categories including Best Display Advertisement, Best Large Display Format Ad, Best Use of Rich Media, Best Overlay Ad, Best Interactive Broadcast ad, Best Next Generation ad, Best B2C Marketing Website, Best B2C Transaction Website, Best B2B Marketing Website, Best B2B Transaction Website.
Each voter will cast his/her vote online. Votes will be tallied by the ad:tech awards team and the People’s Choice will be awarded on April 25th at ad:tech San Francisco.
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ad:tech has partnered with Fast Company and revenue magazine to offer free subscriptions to those who purchase full conference passes.
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OK. Here we go. New York is done and now it’s time to warm up for the San Francisco show. The first thing we’d like to tell you about is the newer, bigger, better Awards Show ad:tech is hosting this year. The biggest yet, the event will judge work in 24 categories from best B to B website to best campaign optimization to best mobile campaign to best overlay ad to best consumer campaign and more. Finalists include AKQA, T3, Mullen, Sharpe Partners, Deep Focus, Ogilvy, Draft/FCB, R/GA, Spacedog and others.
The judging will be done by over 80 members of the advertising community along with an executive panel of 16 including FedEx’s Steve Pacheco, Denuo’s Scott Witt, Organic’s Mark Kingdon and Real Girls Media Network’s Kate Everett-Thorpe. And that’s just the formal stuff.
On Wednesday evening, April 25, during the ad:tech conference in San Francisco, the Awards Ceremony will be held beginning at 5:45PM with an open bar, munchies and DJ Zeph. At 6:30PM, there will be a Cirque du Soleil performance and the awards ceremony will begin at 6:45PM. Following the ceremony at 7:45, another Cirque du Soleil performance will take place with more music from DJ Zeph.
The awards ceremony will be part of ad:tech’s Connect LIVE! event and you can get tickets to both Connect LIVE! and the Awards show here.
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