Rain Washes Away Sins, Sessions End on Ambiguous Note
Like Wash Away Sins Bubblebath, the November rain of New York washed away all the debauchery and chaos from the nights and days before. Sitting, absorbing the awkwardness of New York’s LaGuardia Airport, I filtered through the remaining morsels of ad:tech that I hadn’t yet covered off.
Alan Kelly’s “Elements of Influence” workshop closed out the end of Tuesday’s sessions. Creating his own buzz word by substituting the phrase “playmaking” for strategy, Kelly launched into his science-saturated PowerPoint presentation. Kelly mentioned that he was a son of a cell biologist, and as the presentation continued, it became obvious. Kelly spent five years writing his book with a heavy social science foundation.
read more...Breakthrough Technology Provides Self-Help Session
One of Tuesday’s many sessions opened with a speckled attendance, as the previous day’s energy and excitement took its toll. With just two scheduled panelists, the “Breakthrough Technology: Designing The Future” session played to the after-lunch crowd. Dave Evans from Digital Voodoo gave an anecdotal introduction. Evans explained that this session was about getting lost and finding your way back. Not quite making the nebulous connection between the anecdote and session title, the attendees did their best to understand.
Taking the stage next was Barbara Fittipaldi from the Center for New Futures. With many philosophical statements and aural overlays of the adjacent room’s speaker, some of the crowd began to phase out while others continued to listen. Fittipaldi positioned a breakthrough as something that seems difficult, if not impossible, to reach. One of the attendees asked if the session defined a breakthrough as just another word for a goal. Fittipaldi explained that a major part of a “breakthrough” was making the possible, doable, while not being predictible.
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Marketing Mashups: Navigating Consumer-Driven Marketing
“User-generated content.” It’s become a buzzword unto itself. Internet users embrace Snakes On A Plane. Beck and Janet Jackson encourage music fans to take their music and turn it into something else. Google Maps makes itself available so that programmers can layer it over something else entirely to create something new entirely.
But what’s the motivation for users to generate all this content?
The top reason, according to session moderator Marissa Gluck, co-founder and Managing Partner of Radar Research, which investigated this exact question, is simply: for the fun of it. Rounding out the top five reasons users generate content: to hone technical skills, to create art, to amuse friends, and because they’re fans.
read more...Viral Marketing Sensitive to Nuances, Brands Skimming the Surface
Tuesday’s “The Intricacies of a Great Viral or Word-of-Mouth Marketing Program” session provided an array of case studies from the client perspective. The panel consisted of various speakers who provided insight into how a client views a viral or word-of-mouth campaign. With a bit of plugging for WOMMA out of the way, the session began to take form.
Perhaps one of the more well-known viral campaigns presented was the Philips Shave Everywhere site that launched to an audience of 1.7+ million viewers to date. Zdenek Kratky, a Brand Manager for Philips Norelco, explained due to the project’s low budget, word of mouth marketing came to the forefront as a possible tactic. They spent one year researching and developing this campaign. Despite listing sales goals in the project’s objective, Philips decided to leverage organic word-of-mouth to influence their target audience. Once Kratky presented the site for the session attendees, it was easy to hear why this campaign was a success through the wave of giggles in the room.
read more...Finding the Consumer Pathway
What do you track and how do you make it actionable? We’re deluged with data, what do we do with it?
Moderator: Greg Smith, COO, Neo@ogilvy
Panelists: Alexandre Douzet, Co-Founder & VP of Marketing, TheLadders.com
Dion Sullivan, e-Commerce Marketing, Atom Entertainment/Shockwave.com
Matthew Roche, Founder & CEO, Offermatica
David Herscott, President, MEA Digital
What do you track and how do you make it actionable? We’re deluged with data, what do we do with it? The panelists started with some presentations to illustrate what the problem is.
read more...Linking and Optimization for Better Rankings and More Traffic
An intense session on how search engines work. Mike Grehan, “Global Search Marketing Nomad,” wrote the first book on SEM and started with a series of bad joke. Bad jokes aside, it was a great dissection of how things work.
The most frequent question Grehan is asked is, “Can you help me get into top 10 of major search engines?” Why should you be? The answer is difficult, but he tried to cover the major points of SEM. He covered a lot of ground in this session. Here’s what he talked about (sort of like the notes I took in class).
read more...Social Commerce is King
First content was king. Then it was commerce. Then content again. So what happens when a community comes together to create content and the transactional web? Social commerce. This was the subject of Tuesday’s session, “Social Commerce: Mashing up the Web,” moderated by Stephen Dimarco, VP of Marketing and Client Services, Compete, Inc.
read more...Using Mobile To Monetize Your Brand
Maybe the reason this session was so lightly attended (about 60% of the seats were filled) was that many people felt it would offer little new information relative to yesterday’s standing-room-only Mobile Marketing 101 session. They were right.
Two key points noted yesterday were stressed again today: (1) Mobile should be viewed as just one piece of an overall integrated mobile marketing campaign, not as a stand-along channel. (2) The customers you’re trying to reach are the carriers’ customers, so you’re working in a three-player ecosystem, not the usual two-player model.
What’s on the horizon for mobile? Stephen Smyth, GM, Media, Americas, Reuters.com said that search on the handset is looking interesting, as are RSS applications. Jeff Janer, COO of Third Screen Media cited the rise of video applications, envisioning YouTube on the phone, while Nihal Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Ipsh! anticipated an advertiser trend away from SMS to WAP to WAP sites to Java apps on the handset itself.
Finally, a few financial tidbits to take away: CPMs for mobile campaigns have been pretty consistent in the last 18 months, ranging from $20-$50 . . . The average campaign, according to Mehta, is in the $50,000 to $200,000 range . . . In Japan, mobile marketing in 2006 amounts to about $3.80 per advertiser. In the U.S., it’s less than a buck.
read more...Tiny Technologies Aim Big at ad:tech
ad:tech’s Now and Next Technology Showcase was filled with a collection of small, upstart companies that are providing niche and new products catering to the drastically changing media landscape. One company, adhoc mobile, works with content publishers, brands and mobile service providers to bring marketer’s messaging to multiple mobile applications, text and games. Snapse has launched a video creation platform that provides people tools to draw from multiple online video sources in a streaming fashion to create real-time, custom videos. Marketers can create custom video vignettes which users of the service can integrate into their personally created videos. Believe me, it’s way cooler than I’m describing it.
read more...Models to Make Your Head Spin
With the title “Agent-Based Modeling Workshop: Simulations: The Future of Marketing & Media Mix Planning,” I should have known that I was getting into an academic discussion.
Agent based modeling (ABM), for the uninitiated, is a computer-based tool that will help you better plan. This is how Peter Storck, Presiden of Points North Group, laid the landscape on a very esoteric topic, but apparently pragmatic approach to marketing. This is the same approach taken to for military simulations and predicting the path of communicable diseases. So why not use complexity science for marketing?
read more...Looking into the Crystal Ball
It is rare that a session on “The Future of Advertising” actually yields useful insight. Fortunately, Tuesday’s panel on this very topic was one of the best in recent memory. Perhaps it has something to do with the all-star cast: Ted McConnell, Interactive Innovation Director of P&G, Stuart Elliot, Columnist with the New York Times, David Rosenblatt, CEO of Doubleclick and Peter Naylor, SVP Media Sales for NBC Universal, all moderated by Drew Ianni. And perhaps it is also due to the fact that these speakers raised more questions about dealing with our legacy systems than they proffered predictions.
read more...Pay Per Click Search Marketing Insights
For this paid search session, the best nuggets come in the form of data points from Hitwise’s Bill Tancer.
He started by reviewing findings from its white paper released earlier this year. He said that more than 75% of top 100 search terms driving traffic to all sites are brand or navigational. Bands that are proactively monitoring their brand in search receive upward of 85% of traffic from brands.
read more...Latest Trends in Email Marketing
Perhaps the most interesting current trend in email marketing is something that’s not happening: companies are not looking at email holistically, as part of an overall communications strategy to their customers. Multiple departments in a company may well be sending email to a given customer, but there’s no one managing the communications from a customer’s point of view.
“The word strategic is not there,” observed Paul Beck, Senior Partner and Executive Director of Interactive Marketing and Advertising at OgilvyInteractive, Worldwide.
read more...Navigating the Current of Participatory Communication
On Tuesday, I attended a lunch presentation by Ed Dilworth of Campbell-Ewald which turned out to be an interesting view of what’s going on with today’s proliferation of media choices.
Dilworth started by saying that everything’s turned sideways now. People are coming into sites sideways from links, not from the home page. It’s all nonlinear. You’ve got to plan for this. GM’s Fastlane Blog is a way for GM to converse with consumers--and often a lot of things are said that are “not so nice”. “Starwood Aloft” in Second Life is giving the hotel chain the chance to test concepts with consumers before building them. Peter Jackson put the filmmaking of King Kong online and tried to convert The Lord of the Rings fanbase to King Kong. The Lord of the Rings was “closed” with production top secret. King Kong was “open. Borat: grossed $26 million in its opening weekend at 1,000 theaters--the biggest 1,000 theater opening ever. The cast did a 20 city tour with MySpace people and did a lot on YouTube. In content/gaming, the Navy’s Strike & Retrieve game was a way to evaluate potential recruits and allow them to experience what it’s like to be in the Navy. The Folgers manhole cover campaign ran for 2 hours, McDonald’s sundial was 1 billboard: both got enormous visibility online. Costco is a $17.5B company spends nothing on marketing. It’s an interesting twist, a radical departure from the idea of traditional media campaigns.
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