ClickBooth knows how to pull of a spectacular evening. Murray, Alex and I were invited by Eric Schechter and arrived at Pacha shortly after 9 pm. We were tagged with special wristbands and whipped through the ‘VIP’ line up the stair to a special U-shaped seating area with our own private bar. We overlooked the dance floor and entertainment.
The bar was filled with pitchers of mix and the Grey Goose bottles began showing up. Our wristbands allowed us on all three floors of the nightclub and entertainers came on to the dance floor and stage. Girls on stilts joined the dancers and overall the performers created an extremely entertaining variety of dancing, juggling and stunts. We networked, caught up with friends and partied. Yankees Fan Missy Ward ‘tweeted’ regularly from the Yankees game to keep us all updated on the score. The entire nightclub celebrated right along with Missy and the Yankees as the big screen captured our attention.
The dance floor was packed when “Michael Jackson” came onstage. His voice was great but his moves were magical. We quickly realized he was actually a she - and she put on a great show.
When Slick Rick took the stage just after midnight, the crowd went crazy. He was wearing a’diamond’ encrusted pendant the size of a dinner plate around his neck and a diamond ring that looked bigger than my hand.
After helping a nearly passed out drunk with his cellphone, (the battery fell out when he dropped it) I realized that’s not a good impression to leave at a VIP party put on by such a gracious company as Clickbooth, so I caught a cab.
I could have stayed all night meeting people and mingling but I knew I had a big day at ad:tech coming up. Thanks, Eric and Clickbooth!
Shelly Palmer’s Digital Boot Camp at ad:tech kicked butt.
If you are serious about your career your online presence must reflect it, with no room for error.
Shelly’s first advice was, ‘google’ your name with quotations around the words - like this, “Heather Smith”. DON"T google my name though because you will see Heather Smith, the Porn Star - lol! If your name comes up with good results on the first page you’ve got a great web presence. If it doesn’t Shelly has some tips to help you.
First, create an ‘Online Presence’ sheet as in the picture above. Then get to work - consistency pays off! Ask yourself what you look like, then create a positive online digital presence.
Shelly’s best tip, and something we all need to remember on a day to day basis:
“Don’t Be an Idiot Online!”
Be sure to match your online presence to your offline presence. Look profession, act professional and BE professional. Shelly Palmer is President at National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY and has learned to use humor the correct way during his Boot Camps. He has created a professional online presence and everything he does reflects that.
You will be judged by your PDA, cell phone and laptop!
What cell phone do you carry? Mine is an old ‘Razr’ - lol. You carry one of those or a StarTac, you cannot make any excuse in the world - other than if you live in an area of the Great White North where there is no cell service. Luckily for me I DO fall in that category so I showed Shelly my phone and told him I’m going to bring it to every seminar of his that I ever attend in the future - just as an example, because soon they will be extinct! Invest in a good cell phone! Did you know there are 4 billion cellphones worldwide?
If you are at this age: “49 and fucked” Shelly’s Boot Camp will guide you to midlife reinvention. The ‘socio-techno divide’ is reality for many of us born long before 1989. Think about the kids being born into this digital age - their lives will be incredibly different than ours.
You will be judged by your statistics.
How you appear on Google, your Alexa ranking and your Technorati tags are very telling! Work on it.
You will be judged by your Digital Brand Presence.
Your primary email is an important reflection on you and your brand, together with your website, Facebook page, MySpace, IM/chat, Skype, Wiki and LinkedIn page.
LinkedIn is the ONLY place you should post your resume - not on your blog.
Keep your blog content current, or get rid of it. A great alternative is to build a 5 page website about YOU without dates so it always stays current. Leaving an abandoned FaceBook page or blog will be a direct (and poor) reflection of you, basically implying you are “49 and Fucked” (Shelly’s term) when a prospective employer or client is searching the web for information about you.
It’s no longer enough to communicate. We must change the brand’s conversation to the brand’s advantage. According to Forrester there are 33.5 billion brand conversations every day in the US—and that’s just online.
As Domino’s Pizza found out this spring, if you don’t mange the conversation actively it will manage you. We’ve gone from word of mouth speed to word of click speed—news used to spread from one person to another, one at a time. Now, it spreads geometrically on the web before you know it or can react.
The job of marketers is to have more people speaking positively and fewer people speaking negatively, the ultimate goal being to get endorsed and recommended. According to a study by the London School of Economics, brands with the most recommendations in their category grow four times faster than the category average. Increasing recommendation by 12% doubles sales growth.
It’s not just about buzz. Buzz is just noise. Consumer choice has exploded, and cutting through a highly fragmented media landscape is becoming harder and harder. We want customers to live in high recommendation and conversation. We need to be talked about positively.
This was a great panel moderated by David Carrel, Senior VP Strategy and Analysis, Digitas. Panelists were Kay Madati, VP, Audience Experience & Engagement, CNN Worldwide, Bonin Bough, Global Social Media Director, PepsiCo, Kent Schoen, Product Marketing Manager, Facebook, Jeff Fleischman, Chief Digital Officer, TIAA-CREF, and Pete Blackshaw, Executive VP of Digital Strategic Services, Nielsen Online.
United breaks guitars. CNN misses breaking news. TIAA-CREF saves your retirement. Social networking can be a powerful tool—or quicksand if you handle it wrong.
When United was unresponsive to Dave Carroll’s broken guitar, he wrote a song and put it on Youtube. One week later it had 1 million hits. Now it’s at 6 million. One person can create a global phenomenon, good or bad, for your company. Watch out!
In February 2009 a plane crashed in Buffalo. It was on Twitter within 2 minutes, CNN affiliates carried it an hour and 54 minutes later.
Getting on Facebook and Twitter made TIAA-CREF 15 years younger.
Social media is a focus group on steroids, a platform that’s infinitely revealing of brand value. The strategy in the space has to be fluid. What are the influencers saying? How do we filter out the noise to drive messages that drive the bottom line. How do we plug those things into an existing channel? A limited time offer coming from Twitter needs lots of other channels to test customer interest. On the internet, we can see it happening in real time.
Dax Hamman, VP, Digital Media, iCrossing
Roy de Souza, CEO, Zedo
Rob Leathern, Founder and CEO CPM Advisors
Div Bhansali, Director, Self-Service Products, AOL Advertising
Attention search marketers: display is not just for branding anymore—performance display can work for you! Display goes largely under-leveraged by search and direct response marketers, this panel aimed to change that. So how does direct response marketing use display? This panel, moderated by my colleague Dax Hamman, VP of Display Media at iCrossing proved be another another useful panel with actionable insight and key take-aways for search and other direct response marketers to leverage when considering their marketing mix.
Rob Leathern, CEO of CPM Advisors started off with some helpful insights, “For search marketers, did you know you can use same reporting and info for display as they do for search through the Google Content Network? Also, use your existing search copy that performs for your display campaigns. Keep in mind that translation doesn’t work in all cases, but its a good starting point for testing and tweaking over time. Re-targeting is big for performance display; we see the ROI is between 5-20 times higher than normal display campaigns.”
Recognizing that the whole world of display may be totally new to some search marketers, Dax asked the panel to explain the difference between exchanges and networks, as you hear a lot about them, but how do you know which to go with? Roy de Souza, CEO of Zedo offered this information, “Exchanges are self-service whereas networks sales-oriented with service. Networks tend to have higher quality inventory while the remaining inventory typically goes to exchanges. Direct marketers are beginning to converting to display because of issues of scale with buying search inventory—there’s just not enough, and those who get this are doing well in display”
In 2008, US measured media was $280 billion, of which $254 billion was offline and $26 billion online. 73% of offline media was brand marketing whereas online, direct response marketing was 76% of the mix. Part of the skew is attributable to the measurability of direct response, particularly online, and the difficulty of measuring brand marketing.
Connecting online ads to offline purchases is difficult at best. Comscore published a white paper in 2008 on the dramatic underestimation of display advertising ROI, primarily the result of the fact that any assessment of less tangible brand marketing is qualitative and after the fact.
Online has been held to higher standards than traditional, because everything is measured, and probably because we still need to prove the value of online for branding. In the past few years we’ve made great strides to prove the efficacy of digital advertising on the consumer funnel. According to the panelists, we’ve reached a threshold and there are now good technologies that can help us measure. However, the truth is it’s still difficult to connect the dots between online ads and offline purchases.
The mix on this panel was interesting: one marketer (Andy Markowitz of Kraft), two agencies (Carl Fremont of Digitas and Richard Guest of Tribal DDB) and two technology companies (Dan Beltramo of Vizu and Andy Atherton of brand.net which claim to provide tools to help read the tea leaves).
I attended the session, “Creative Showcase II: Cool Stuff - That works!” at ad:tech on November 5 - and was totally impressed with the quality of information, the topic and the statistics. Once again, the panelists were giving “thumbs up” to the blogging community for their part in helping execute tremendously successful advertising campaigns!
How do you make ‘automotive’ appeal to the masses - especially the 19 - 25 demographic in Quebec? With futuristic, interactive, geocaching, intriguing marketing of course!
Without revealing the brand, (Mazda) a huge campaign was launched on the premise that ‘Zera’ from 2333 came to Earth to find the “Essence” of life. From blogging, to print, to street, to billboard, to Facebook, to interactive television, the story line was played out involving a huge number of players who were seeking the “keys” to help Zera protect our planet which was to become ‘homogenized’ in the future, thereby eliminating joy from life.
As the viral campaign progressed, new, unexpected elements were added as needed by the campaign team, creating even more intrigue as clues to find the 33 geocached ‘keys’ were revealed over a 33 day period. The campaign exceeded all projections and Mazda emerged as the clear winner as people realized they were vying for the ‘keys’ to the possibility of winning a new car.
With all of the talk about the long tail of advertising, you might start to wonder: is it sustainable? Does it really work? Can niche publishers (aka blogs) actuallly make money, and continue to do so?
Panelists in this session from Digg, Google, AOL, Technorati, and Associated Content address the challenges of monetizing niche properties, applying Chris Anderson’s much-talked-about theory to the blogosphere.
Highlights from The Next Frontier in Advertising — Widgets, Apps, and Viral Video:
From Ro Choy of RockYou…
Build Fan pages — it’s by far the most cost efficient way to amplify your reach across Facebook’s user base. Also consider CPC ads on Facebook: there’s no better place than social media for performance marketing. At one point, Facebook might even be Google’s biggest competitor.
Greg March, Wieden+Kennedy…
The most important thing to do before (and during) a social media campaign is to clearly communicate its role in the big plan to senior management and to clients. You know what you’re going to achieve, but they don’t always know how to draw that straight line between the campaign and the big picture objectives, or business goals.
Also, don’t expect conversions. For all intensive purposes, catching people at the point of intent (i.e., searching for a product/service or information about it) is better place to close the deal. Social media will increase the number of fans and spread your message, but won’t make instant sales.
Chris Cunningham, appsavvy…
Totally agreeing with March: Social media is a conversation, and people don’t want to be interrupted from it to buy something. Because of this, the old metrics simply don’t work. Use new “key performance indicators” (KPIs) to find out the effectiveness of your social campaign. For example, track fans or video views, not clickthroughs or conversions.
Also, don’t standardize social media. The IAB apparently told appsavvy to “run with” their current development and not to try to fit new technology into any kind of bucket. An audience member adds, That’s great. We shot ourselves in the foot 10 years ago by standardizing ad units. Let’s not strangle innovation with doing that again.
Posted by David Spark · Thursday November 05, 2009
David Spark here, reporting for ad:tech at ad:tech NY 2009 and here’s my second and last show report for the conference. Watch this video for a full summary of my findings from today and make sure you watch my show report from yesterday. Thanks again to everyone who participated in interviews. And thanks to you for watching.
I spoke with Josh Crandall, President, Co-founder of Netpop Research. I asked him what his sense of the buzz on the floor, and he said that he’s seeing a new sense of respect for the consumer. He mentioned the company Upsell which engages with consumers with instant messaging when they visit the site. I must say I saw Upsell a couple of years ago and that instant messaging was fully robotic and a tad annoying. Josh says that it’s changed now. It does start out robotic, but when there’s a response they route the discussion to an actual person.
I just chatted with James Citron, CEO of Mogreet who showed me a demo of their SMS to video messaging application with my video. In fact, they used 20 seconds of my video for the demo. To see it in action, text “SPARK” to 21534 and you’ll see a 20 second tease of my show report from yesterday.
I chatted with Ted Murphy, CEO of Izea, the company that makes the paid blogging service, Social Spark. Wonder why I was so interested in them? I had met Murphy before and followed up with him, not just because he’s got two new services, Sponsored Tweets, and sponsored guest blog posts, Sponzai. The idea for Sponzai is your company can write a blog post and another blogger can put the entire blog on their site as a sponsored guest post.
I was more interested in talking with Murphy about his experience working with the FTC on their blogging guidelines. While they’ve always required disclosure for Social Spark, Murphy said what he was most surprised about regarding the FTC’s ruling was that they were really going after celebrities who for years had been hiding their affiliations as to who was sponsoring them.
I spoke with Pete Blackshaw, EVP of strategic services at Nielsen about the sometimes uneasy relationship between paid (advertising) and earned (blogging and articles) media. I asked how paid advertisers can work better with earned media and Blackshaw said that advertisers need to understand the role that earned media plays with paid media. It can reinforce the message, take it to the next level, change it, or tear it down.
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