The keynote roundtable panel was moderated by Jon Fine of BusinessWeek, who fully admitted that he had aspirations of running it like McLaughlin Group, and included Jason Hirschhorn of Sling Media Entertainment Group, Kourosh Karimkhany from Wired Digital, Caroline H. Little of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, and Suzie Reider, from YouTube. And amidst all the early morning blather - yes, 9:30 is early - it was Reider who made the most newsworthy announcement: YouTube is going to be rolling out the ads this summer.
There was no dramatic gasp from the audience, no cheering, no boo-ing. In fact, the announcement was met with the quiet hush - one that that can only occur in a pre-caffeinated audience.
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Joost is an interesting company since the guys behind it have already truly disrupted two industries: file sharing and phone, with Kazaa and Skype respectively. David Clark from Joost USA, said that they feel that the company has set very high expectations, and are feeling the pressure.
Joost fundamentally doesn’t believe that the old guys are “the bad guys.” In the case of TV, Joost supports the TV networks and wants to work with them.
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There are two kinds of keynotes at industry trade conferences. There’s the kind that keep you on the edge of your seat eager to drink in the wisdom of those on stage. Then, there’s the kind that are…well, shall we say…less than awe inspiring. Unfortunately, the ad:tech San Francisco 2007 kick off keynote was one of the latter. Reminiscent of an old video interview between a major network and the founders of Razorfish, during which a frustrated reporter could not get a straight forward description of what the company actually did, today’s keynote featured aQuantive (now owner of avenue a/razorfish) CEO Brian McAndrews interviewed by Fast Company Senior Editor Lynne Johnson. It took a bit longer than other keynotes to deliver the meat.
There’s absolutely no disparagement of the expertise that sat on stage today as the two discussed “The Digital Decade - What the Past Five Years Can Teach Us About the Next 5,” but it took an interminably long time to get to the keynote’s deliverable nuggets. One such nugget was McAndrews suggestion to agencies that social media be approached somewhat like a “big focus group” and that marketers would be best served by paying attention to what gets written on blogs, in forums and on social networks. With the rise of consumer control over media, marketing is clearly a two way street - far from the one way megaphone approach of yesteryear.
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