The Balance Between Clicking and Ticking
Clicks, Ticks, and the Destiny of Pop-Ups
I just hopped out of the Clicks, Ticks, and the Destiny of Pop-Ups session. The room was pretty full on the last day of the event. I was a little bummed out to hear the audience still beating a dead horse when asking panelists if rich ads online were dubbed intrusive.
To no surprise, Rich LeFurgy, president of Archer Advisors addressed this head-on by saying, “There needs to be a balance between best practices and advertiser demand. I don’t think we are in danger of being regulated (as spam he begun to be) but I could be wrong. However, we must implement session capping on both a site and user basis. No one would watch television if they were forced to view an ad every minute. Content and advertising need to be balanced.”
Barbara Bacci Mirque, a senior vice president at the Association of National Advertisers, chest-beat about the viability of rich media in the online advertising space. She said, “Two years ago people were ready to write off online advertising completely.” Being an agency buyer two years ago, I tend to disagree. But I did agree with her sentiment when she echoed Rich’s comments, saying, “We must understand what resonates with our target audience.”
Avi Nader, CEO of WhenU strongly stated that he thinks all rich media units should be labeled: “We should let the user choose.”
The bottom line is that conversations on this topic are still behind the times. As responsible advertisers and publishers, we need to kick this up a notch. Let’s standardize units, push the envelope on creativity within such units, and think about what clicks with our target audiences - and more importantly, what’s ticking them off.
read more...I Want My iTV
Session: MyTV (Television Marketing in the Age of Consumer Empowerment)
What a substantial representation of interactive television industry experience and ideas! Allan McLennan has been in the business at least since the early ‘80s and was one of the founders of Worlds Inc., an early 3-D avatar driven chat environment that - even in the mid-’90s - put its later rivals the Palace and the still-new There to shame. Panelist-cum-moderator David Hutchinson, VP of TV integration for the Phelps Group worked on some of CityTV‘s early interactive television experiments.
The panel was also graced by the more-than-token TiVo representative Kimber Sterling. And even though MediaVest‘s Adam Gerber admits to being new to the industry, he name dropped the early-’90s Orlando project, so it’s clear he’s doing his best to get up to speed quickly. Gosh, why does that feel so long ago?
McLennan’s expertise and experience was given extremely short shrift even though he was the opening panelist. He was tasked with defining interactive television - which is a bit like defining “online community” or “blogs,” much less their commercial applications, and he spent much of his time roaring through a healthy highlight of extra-North American examples, which gently countered an earlier panel‘s assertion that we don’t need to look to Europe for TV- and phone-based success stories any more.
If anything, TiVo is a watershed iTV success story - or is on the cusp of such. Sterling painted a picture of what the future of TV might be like in a TiVo-inspired world: Enhanced advertising featuring information-based marketing messages, product placement that steps beyond virtual product placement, and what Sterling terms “couch commerce,” or Amazon-like one-click ordering from your chesterbed.
To close, Gerber held up the increasing importance of the TV remote as the new UI-driving peripheral. Which brings us back to Hutchinson’s assertion that the consumer is king - regardless of how important content may be.
“In the 1950’s, people said that Milton Berle sold more TV’s than RCA,” Hutchinson says in the ending Q&A. “In the ‘80s, ‘I Want My MTV’ really drove the success of cable. Today, do things like American Idol drive iTV?
A full transcript of this session is also available.
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Dialing for Dollars
Session: Mobile Marketing (It’s Here and It’s Real)
This panel comprised a wide-ranging crew of qualified service providers representing all companies involved in mobile marketing: an association head, a marketing firm, an advertising agency representing advertisers, a product developer and a technology company. Everyone had impressive client rosters - including companies like Reebok, Comedy Central, Volkswagen, JetBlue, and Procter & Gamble - as well as quick case studies, but only a couple of panelists offered immediately actionable advice and ideas.
It’s not just Ad:Tech, trust me, but I get frustrated by presentations or panel discussions that are basically just a rapid-fire roundup of related examples. As the industry continues to evolve, I think we need to move beyond proof of concept - and investment rationalization - more quickly and start sharing more lessons and practices.
Nihal Mehta, president of ipsh! telegraphed some of the lessons shared by Nathan Woodman, an account director for MPGMedia Contacts. And together, they provide some practical insight on what will help make mobile marketing campaigns work, and work well:
- Mobile marketing is currently driven by the younger demographics.
- The music and entertainment industry is a natural first fit.
- Client companies need to have an intrinsic audience such as teens or business travelers. (I’d warrant sports fans would also be an interesting niche.)
- Promoted products and services need to be intimate and personal.
- Calls to action need to be immediate.
- Brand identities need to be innovative.
Other panelists did mirror some of the above, so it might be that Mehta and Woodman had that first speakers’ advantage. In fact, Carrie Himelfarb, VP of sales for Vindigo offered a powerful example of when mobile marketing will work best: “Retail is really interesting,” she says. “I’m on the street corner looking for a product. That’s a good time for Best Buy to talk to me.”
When I can walk down the street past a bookstore and get an SMS indicating that a book on my wantlist is in stock - and on sale just for me - I’ll be an extremely happy man.
A full transcript of this session is also available.
read more...Blogging for Business
Session: Blogging for Business
Here are the two main questions the PR and marketing communities have on blogs: Do they have a real business application? And can PR people interact with bloggers? The answer to both questions is yea, according to the panelists.
Panelists:
- Rick Bruner, moderator, Chief Researcher, MarketingWonk
- Anil Dash, Six Apart
- Thomas Zorbach, VM People (set up blog for German company
- Ernest Von Rosen, AMG Media
- Nick Denton, President, Gawker Media
- Griff Wigley, Wigley & Assoc
The problem with this session, attended by about 80 people, is that it tried to cover the entire issue of blogging in an hour. About a third of the audience was there because they were curious about blogging; another third read blogs and a handful were actual bloggers. It’s pretty much an impossible mix, and my main complaint about most conferences, which mix all levels in the same room and end up having a tough time satisfying any.
It’s really hard to talk about blogs without seeing blogs and, sadly, Ad-Tech has been fraught with technical problems all day and couldn’t provide an Internet connection for this session. Nonetheless, there was some very good information about blogging and its use to businesses and its opportunities for the PR community.
read more...What’s the Buzz? Tell Me What’s A-Happening
Session: Epidemic, Buzz, and Experimental Marketing (A New Class of Integrated Marketing)
There’s a lot of buzz about buzz marketing lately. Forgive me for saying it, but the phrase might even be on the verge of becoming a, well, buzzword. Malcolm Gladwell‘s schooled us on the importance of the Tipping Point. Seth Godin‘s turned us onto ideaviruses. But how can we take word of mouth, harness it, and reap the benefits?
This panel, while making a solid case for buzz marketing, fell slightly short of sharing real tips, techniques, and tactics. Which is what we need. It might be the case that the practice needs to mature some more before we have enough case studies to serve as a base from which we can learn. It might have been the panel’s size - almost all of the five-panelist sessions I’ve gone to have felt overly hurried - and it might have been the fact that it bumped up against tonight’s awards ceremony. But as I left the ballroom, I couldn’t help but want more on buzz marketing.
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