Happy Monday!

Take a listen to this Webmasterradio.fm  interview of Advertise CEO Dan Yomtobian from ad:tech earlier this month.

–The Advertise team

Since my last Ad 2 event, I’ve given up caffeine and carbs. No more coffee and bagels for me for the time being. However, what I have not given up is kicking serious advertising ass and working hard at ECHO Interaction Group. We’re a youngish, newish digital agency right in the heart of Downtown Orlando at the Plaza. We specialize in digital, interactive, social media and multicultural marketing. The company was born at a trade show exactly one year ago. Last weekend, a few of us returned to the advertising motherland, New York City, to attend the Ad:Tech conference as a fully operational entity. Two of the ECHO partners, Carlos Carbonell, Mat Gaver and myself left Orlando on Tuesday afternoon and before I knew it, it was Friday afternoon and were touching back down at MCO.

The Ad:Tech conference was a natural disaster of information, networking and exposure to what the rest of the industry is up to. Walking the show floor was a bit of sensory overload. Exhibitors of all types were showing off their products, services and trade show gimmicks. I wasn’t even sure if some of them knew they were at an advertising conference, but they went all out anyway. Booth Babes? Free Beer? Don’t mind if I do.

The meat and potatoes of the show were the focus sessions and roundtables. We split up and attended as many as we could, presenters included executives from Facebook, CNN, Mazda, Pepsi, Nielsen and some of the biggest and brightest agencies in the land. It was highly educational and interesting to see some of the case studies and projects that have been successfully executed (or not so successfully) on national and international scales. I worked in NYC during the summer before coming back to Orlando to work for ECHO so when the show was over for the day, there were friends to catch up with outside of the Ad:tech sponsored parties (although somehow we made it to those too).

All said, it was an extremely successful and enjoyable trip. We didn’t sleep much, but in New York City, who needs it? I returned with some leads, plenty of industry perspective and a massive appreciation for a quite night sleeping in my own bed.

Jon Miller | Associate Marketing Director
ECHO Interaction Group
jon@beginanecho.com | http://www.beginanecho.com
facebook.com/echointeraction | twitter.com/echointeraction

ad:tech New York 2009 was a great success this year. With more than 250 exhibitors, the Javits Convention Center was packed with the largest gathering of online marketers.

ad:tech is an opportunity for brands, agencies, publishers and service providers to come together to share, network, learn and do business.

So much hard work went into the setup for CPX Interactive!

CPX Interactive had a great booth location with tons of traffic.

“A lot of our clients are here,” said, Mike Zacharski, VP of Publisher Development for CPX Interactive. “It’s a great time to meet face to face with our advertisers and publishers.”

Some of the main discussions at ad:tech New York included maximizing international markets, increasing digital spending, increased focus on internal communication and innovation with branding.

Thanks to everyone for making this ad:tech New York a success! Check out our video of ad:tech Day 1 ! Or check out our pictures on Flickr.

Hey All,

Ad:Tech was truly an incredible event…there were over TEN THOUSAND attendees! It was literally a sea of people in the biz. So, in an effort to make things interesting, patrolled the floor looking for attendees wearing our awesome slap bracelet giveaway. Needless to say, we put a smile on the faces of these unsuspecting winners.

Have a look at our secret agents make their way through the crowd to find the winners!

-Advertise.com

Performics, the marketing arm of Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Nerve Center, and analytics firm ROI Research, unveiled a joint-effort report at New York Ad:tech with some impressive findings. The report was compiled using over 3,000 responses to an online survey from social network users.

Here are some of the quick take-away’s:

• 46% have recommended or talked about a product or brand on Facebook, and 44 percent have done the same on Twitter.
• 31% felt social networking sites are great for seeking company and product information.
• 30% learned about a new product, service or brand from a social networking site, and 25 percent have gone directly to an online retailer or ecommerce site after learning about a new product or brand.
• 25% have recommended a product or brand to friends through social networking sites.
• 20% have discussed them on social sites after seeing an ad elsewhere.
• 27% reported being receptive to invitations to events, special offers or promotions received through social networking sites.

Notable Quotes:

• “Brands have a bigger opportunity than people would think-consumers are open to receiving promotions and offers from brands that they’ve connected with through social networks…Social networking between a consumer and a brand has created this interesting dynamic where you’re making a brand your friend and you’re treating like a friend.”" – Scott Haiges, president of ROI Research.

As far as which brand messages connect with consumers, as you can imagine freebies and deals dominate.  Printable coupons are at the top (surprise surprise – people like free stuff!), with 32 percent of consumers saying it resonates with them. Sales and special deals (28 percent) and offers to win points for some type of online currency (23 percent) follow.

Ad Tech conference is one the most prestigious gathering of publishers, online marketers, affiliates, CPA networks, MLM experts and other marketing specialists.

For the last 7 years, As Seen on PC has been regularly attending Ad tech conferences without any break. Due to this, Curtis Clarke (Founder/CEO As Seen on PC) and his team of experts have managed to build strong business relationships, collaborations and affiliati0ns with industry gurus and firms.

Ad Tech New York 2009 - As Seen On PC

Curtis Clarke met business associates and partners to discuss the potentials of As Seen on TV arena and its impact on affiliate marketing. As Seen on PC works with its affiliates to create success stories and winning combinations wherever possible.

Curtis Clarke

As Seen on PC has recently announced INCREMENTS in commissions / payouts to its affiliates. This holiday season is going to be every affiliate marketer’s dream come true. As Seen on PC is offering some of the highly prolific, most wanted As Seen on TV products with increased payouts.

Craig Amell - As Seen On PC

The top affiliate offers include:

-          Perfect Brownie™ Baking Pan

-          Snuggie™ for Dogs

-          Snuggie™ for Kids

-          Designer Snuggie™

-          Snuggie Blanket™

-          Swivel Sweeper®

-          Turbo Snake

-          InStyler®

Checkout the individual posts for above products, register for free and start promoting them on your blogs, websites, portals or emails campaigns now.

Agency bosses too old and change resistant, claims Sorrell
WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell (aged 64) claims that brands are not spending enough online because the people who run their agencies are too old and resistant to change. Delivering the opening keynote session at ad:tech New York, Sorrell criticised brands for investing an average of just 13 per cent of their marketing budget online despite the rapid increase in digital media consumption.

Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead
Ana Andjelic opines: “Any conversation about digital marketing these days includes at least one mention that traditional agencies just “don’t get it.” While this may be correct, it’s equally true that digital agencies are not ready to take the lead. Look at the typical digital agency. It excels in exploring new horizons. It supports a flat and loose organizational structure in which a developer has access to the CEO. And it makes sure everyone’s opinion is heard. It’s one big crazy family. Digital agencies are having fun experimenting with ideas, technologies and strategies to find new alternatives superior to obsolete ways of doing marketing. That’s what they do best. The problem is, this is the only thing they are doing. When they are asked to actually follow through on their ideas, they often come up short. It is because they don’t know the business of marketing (or want to know it, for that matter), and they rarely have the organizational structure or past practices to guide them.”

Possibly related

“Sir Martin Sorrell: Rupert Murdoch’s pay wall plan is right (telegraph.co.uk)

Profits halved at advertising firm WPP (guardian.co.uk)

Does Sir Martin have another motive for peddling his alphabet soup? (telegraph.co.uk)

WPP profits down by nearly 50% (guardian.co.uk)

WPP sees little evidence of ’stouter hearts’ needed to spend during downturn (telegraph.co.uk)

Two years ago this week I was in New York, along with 10,000 others, attending Ad:Tech. From memory (ex capite) 3 floors of the New York  Hilton were decked out with 300+ exhibitors.

The atmosphere was electric. Full of energy and hope. For four whole days digital  media and advertising’s best minds gathered to share in the vision: “The Art of Conversation: Building Great Brands in the Digital Age”

That year Nick Brien, the Worldwide CEO of Universal McCann gave the opening key-note address on The New Media Universe: Forging a Model of Interdependence.

He was out to prove to the audience that, although it had taken almost 2 decades, the Ad Industry now got the “whole online, interactive, new media thing” and how it was rapidly reshaping the media landscape. 

I remember him speaking eloquently and energetically about the new strategic dynamic facing the ad industry. The new terms of engagement:

Yesterday advertising was all about the old persuaders. Today it is all about the new influencers.

How timing was now everything. The 80’s had been about content (i.e. Making great ads), the 90’s about contact (i.e. Relationship management) and today it was all about context.

The idea that the customer doesn’t want to be interrupted unless they are ready… and when you do interrupt it better be personal. Today it’s all about me not you!

All good strategic  insights but when it came to the punchline the story just didn’t gel.

Why? Simply because he pulled out an award winning TV Commercial and Billboard campaign from Australia to demonstrate how his Global Agency was leading the industry in interacting with this brave new world of young influencers.

What he was saying was: “Look everybody we finally get it”. What he was showing us was: “We make great TV commercials and now we can post them online too!”

A week earlier I had been in Chicago attending a conference where Professor Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT Sloan School of Digital Business gave a key-note presentation on Digital Organisations. As he closed the show he suggested that the best way to understand the nature of the enormous strategic challenges facing the USA was to simply consider this salient lesson from history.

Britain had invented the Industrial Revolution but it was the USA that had ultimately perfected and profited from it.

History tells us that the US became the world’s industrial powerhouse thanks to practical innovations like the production line.  What is not recorded is the idea that the British failed to fully capitalise on the industrial revolution because the very culture that allowed them to invent and give birth to the industrial revolution eventually became the primary barrier to Britain perfecting and profiting from it.

Listening to Nick, and watching his TV campaign, I could not help wondering what the future held for these pioneers of the Information Revolution.

End Note:

The advertising industry has a symbiotic relationship with the mass media. If newspaper and T.V. advertising revenues fall so do advertising agency revenues. The simple fact is the Advertising Industry and the Mass Media are facing and sharing the same challenges.

For example

• Is the internet really responsible for the decline of the newspapers?
• What If: Subscriptions become the New York Times’ main revenue stream?
• Who holds the key to MobCon profitability?
• What is the MobCon?
• The real problem is FLINK!
• Why putting ads on the menu won’t pay for lunch

Two Years on and eConsultancy is reporting that the “free versus paid” debate is  the key point of discussion on the first day of Ad:Tech NY 09. 

In the key note address Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP has apparently backed Rupert Murdoch’s idea of making customers pay for media content online.  Others, like Conde Nast’s Josh Stinchcomb, think the emerging mobile market offers the best hope for subscription content.  Mixed revenue models are being openly discussed and there is a recognition that there will be a lot of experimentation in the marketplace before the right formula is discovered for monetizing digital media.

As part of the run-up to the Context Revenue Strategies conference this week (on Thursday, October 5th only and FKA AdSpace at last Spring’s adTech in San Francisco), we’ll be running some terrific Q&A with some of the panelists from the CRS kick-off panel “The State of Content Advertising: The Players, The Options, The Best Practices” at 9am on Thursday, November 5th.

Today, here is a Q&A between panelist Oded Itzhak, Founder and CEO of AdSide and moderator Jay Sears, EVP at ContextWeb, Inc and the ADSDAQ Exchange.

Your Name: Oded Itzhak

Your Job: Founder and CEO of DOCLIX – Operator of the AdSide advertising network for premium publishers and advertisers.

Your Company: AdSide is a premium pay-per-click ad network, serving tier-1 content publishers, advertisers and media agencies. The network delivers highly-targeted text ads within a controlled environment of pre-screened content sites.

AdSide’s Two-Step Click^TM model ensures advertisers pay only for twice-qualified clicks, and only from high-performing sites. Advertisers benefit from a powerful combination of qualified leads, premium sources of traffic, flexible targeting, and ad placement control – at optimal price points. Customers are top-50 and regional interactive agencies, performance advertisers and large brand publishers.

It used to be contextual advertising was the “step child” of search, living in its shadow. It finally seems to be coming into its own. Do you agree or disagree and what are the macro forces contributing to this shift?

Contextual Advertising started as an extension to SEM, allowing search engines to display paid listings on content pages using keyword-based relevancy algorithms. In recent years we’ve been seeing content-targeting evolving beyond the keyword and taking a separate path from search. Today marketers can place text-based CPC ads while also taking into account the demographics traits and interests of their target audience, making targeting a more accurate process.

Why does content and context matter?

Content and context are indicative of the users’ interests and state of mind when they click on an ad. This benefits both the advertisers and the publishers. Advertisers benefit from higher conversion rates and publishers from a higher CTR.

How does behavioral and demographic targeting tie in with content and context? Or does it? Mutually exclusive or best used together?

I believe that demographic and behavioral targeting make more sense with certain types of content where a pure keyword-based contextual algorithm might not work so well. For example, on content pages such as a news article about a car accident, where a pure algorithmic model could lead to ads like: “Get your degree in car accidents.”

The Long Tail and media fragmentation. More than 80% of Internet sessions start with search-the advertiser’s customer is now everywhere. Adsense has one million publishers carrying its ad tags. How do you compete in the Long Tail and against an installed based such as Adsense?

Long tail provides great reach but might not offer a good fit for some marketers. For example, marketers that look for a brand-safe environment should rethink long-tail. Other problems associate with long-tail include click fraud, accidental clicks, lack of transparency and the lack of ability to optimize on a per site basis, concerns that are less of an issue with premier, large sites .

Site targeting. When you move into the Long Tail (or even past the top 1,000 or 2,000 publishers), can site targeting deliver scalable solutions to advertisers? Is content a better answer because it is a common currency across all web pages?

I believe that it’s impractical to manage site- (or placement) targeting with a long list of long-tail sites. Beyond the premium or well-known mid-tier list of sites, content targeting is better accomplished on a category level, allowing advertisers to place ads across a large number of sites that cater to users with similar interests and demographic traits.

Keyword vs. category targeting. Keywords are the holy grail of search. But are keywords effective in content targeting? Are they a destructive vestige of search-too granular or sometimes out of context to be impactful for content targeting? Is category targeting the answer?

Category-based targeting is an effective subset of contextual targeting. It allows advertisers to reach audiences on their go-to websites, and deeper within the same demographics – beyond what is accessible through keyword targeting.

Pricing Models. CPM. CPC. CPA. Cost Per Whatever-engagement, order-Cost Per Flowbee. Is this the direction we are headed? Good or bad?

CPA is a no-brainer for DR advertisers. It ensures positive ROI; however it places all of the risk on the publisher, which many quality publishers will refuse. The CPC model shares the risk between advertisers and publishers, but doesn’t provide the branding benefits of display ads. CPM is the de-facto standard for branding campaigns, however it assumes that all impressions are created equal. It also incentivizes publishers to artificially create lesser inventory by adding more units per page, republishing 3rd party content, or creating photo galleries, etc. For pure branding campaigns, a new model should be developed to replace the CPM model.

Tell us about you.

What did you do last Saturday?

Sunday pumpkin picking with my kids.

Your LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/oded-itzhak/0/a07/4b2

Thanks, Oded!

Oded’s Bio:

Oded Itzhak is part of a leading group of performance advertising experts. Prior to founding AdSide, Oded was Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Quigo, a leading pay per click ad network which was acquired by AOL in 2007. Oded was responsible for developing Quigo’s PPC technologies and owns several search marketing and content targeting patents. Prior to launching Quigo, Oded held senior engineering and management positions at Electronic Arts, and was Chief Technology Officer at WorldImaging, Inc. Oded holds a BSc degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.

About CRS

Produced by Marc Phillips and David Rodnitzky in conjunction with adTech, CRS is a “conference within a conference” is 100% focused on contextual advertising-an area that has needed its own conference for some time. Please join us for the CRS kick-off panel “The State of Content Advertising: The Players, The Options, The Best Practices” at 9am on Thursday, November 5th.

Our panel looks like:

ADVERTISING:
The State of Content Advertising: The Players, The Options, The Best Practices

Where is contextual advertising going? What’s hot, what’s not? What can you do today to make your content buys massively profitable? This roundtable discussion features some of the top minds in contextual advertising sharing their insight on the state of the industry now, and in the future.

MODERATOR:
Jay Sears, Executive VP, Strategic Products and Business Development, ContextWeb, Inc./ADSDAQ Exchange

PANELISTS:
James Colborn, Director, Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft

Oded Itzhak, Founder and CEO, AdSide

Brett Brewer, President, AdKnowledge

Geri Guillermo, Director of Sales, BidPlace Pro, Sponsored Listings and AOL Search, AOL Advertising

Jeff Arena, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo!

Rajas Moonka, Group Business Product Manager, Google, Inc.

Special offer: Register today and receive $100 discount (Promo Code: CRSNY91) for the upcoming Content Revenue Strategies @ ad:tech NY

I’m fortunate enough to be off to NYC next week to attend AdTech NYC 2009.  I attended AdTech SFO earlier in the year and found it hugely beneficial, mainly in terms of getting a wider perspective on digital trends from the USA from both leading advertisers and major agencies.

Sessions I’m attending include:

Day 1

• Opening Keynote with Sir Martin Sorrell (WPP) 2010: What’s coming down the line
• Defining the New Media Currency—How to Bring Traditional Media Metrics Online, Or Should We?
• The Modern Agency
• Advertising Operations in the Digital Age: How to Build, Scale and Leverage a Next Generation AdOps System
• The New Consumer Funnel: Engagement Mapping and the Death of the Last Click Reporting Standard
• Marketing 3.0—Building Great Brands in the Digital Age
• TV 3.0: Reach + Targetability—The Promise of Addressable Advertising

Day 2

• Keynote: Jonathan Miller, Chief Digital Officer, Chairman and CEO, Digital Media Group, News Corporation
• The Rise of the Audience Marketplace
• Digital Branding: Measuring the Effectiveness of Online Brand Advertising
• The Twitter Effect: Leveraging Twitter to Drive Brand Engagement and Bottom-Line Results
• Creative Showcase I: Going Beyond Digital—Contagious Ideas That Change the Conversation
• Creative Showcase II: Cool Stuff—That Works!

I hope to post interesting updates and views from each day, stay tuned if you are interested or as always drop me an email & I’ll send an update or session pack if I get one.

Next week, CPX will be exhibiting at and attending ad:tech NY for the fifth year. New York is one of ten ad:tech shows that are put on each year in seven different countries.  It is “the largest gathering of online marketers,” with more than 200 speakers and more than 250 exhibitors. The event will take place at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City from November 4-6.

Attendees are also given the opportunity to have a place in the exhibition hall, which is free to the public, and provides people with access to a variety of companies in one space. For the first time this year, ad:tech New York will be held at the Javits Center. CPX Interactive will be at booth #1500 (highlighted in black below), right in front of the registration area. Be sure to stop by and say hello!

Adtech reklam şirketi eylül ayı ödemelerini işleme koydu sanırım 3-4 gün içerisinde hesaplarımızda olucaktır adtech kesiceğini gene kesmişssin tebrik ederiz

I spoke at Over The Air 2009 recently and have just uploaded my slides to share with the attendees and thought I’d share them with my readers too, in case you want to get a better view of what the BBC is up to on mobile and also, some of my personal predictions for what might happen in the mobile space.

Makes your life easier

Uses unique hardware capabilities on the device

Makes a better media experience on your device

Makes it FUN (aka GAMES)

Full details are in the slides and if you want to know more (since the talk isn’t on there), just get in touch.

The other part I wanted to highlight were my personal predictions around things that I think will unfold in the mobile space.  They are:

Mobile take centre stage as the first computing device you turn to

Everything becomes connected – clothing, toys, etc

Everything filtered via location

Mass participation and creativity will grow

Again, there’s more in the presentation but if you want to talk about any of these, or find out more, just get in touch.

I also gave a longer version of the talk at Ad-Tech London – part of London Digital Week.  If you want to see the extended version (with more details and examples of good stuff in the industry), dive in here:

Fascinating afternoon at ad:tech London 09 at Olympia.  The exhibition was buzzing, with many different businesses on show backed by a presence from trade bodies including the IAB and the DMA.  The room was full with promises of exciting new technologies delivering insight, research, targeting, search, ad networks, direct response, video marketing integration… if it was digital marketing, it was probably on show!

Next door in the conference, it was quieter, more considered. Four separate streams running throughout the day across a broad range of subjects.  We had two clients speaking in different events.  In one event I attended – The Social Networking Power Panel – execs from iVillage, Bebo, Wayn.com and BT TradeSpace interacted with the floor answering good old-fashioned questions pitched by mic alongside comments and questions posted from attendees using Twitter.  The use of the technology was interesting but at times, I felt, a distraction from the speakers.

For further info on the event (it’s on tomorrow – Wednesday), hop on at http://www.ad-tech.com/london

A final thought… One question today in particular intrigued me.  A business owner said that they had tried PR and events and now wanted to use Social Media to build their business.  Nobody on the panel expressed the view that PR is central to a Social Media strategy; that Social Media is another powerful channel for the business to engage and build relations with its public(s).  I’m left tonight with the view there is a continued responsibility to educate businesses of the role PR has to play in the online world, as effective as the role it plays in the offline world.

By Samantha Karol, Senior Marketing Assistant

Next week is Advertising Week in New York City. While some of our team will be in London for the ad:tech show, others will attend OMMA Global and Mediapost’s Future of Media back in New York.

OMMA Global is a biannual two day event that combines all of Mediapost’s conferences into one “super-conference.” It takes place on September 21-22 this year, and CPX Interactive is happy to be sponsoring this mega event. If you’re there, be sure to look for CPX on your lanyard, in the show program, and in several of the print publications that will be distributed throughout the conference. The event theme is The New Socialism, focusing on the dramatic rise in popularity and influence of social media.

On September 23, is Mediapost’s Future of Media Forum. A special issue of Media Magazine forms the foundation for discussion, and takes a look at the distant and not so distant future of media. You can find CPX on cover three of the magazine. The two-hour program is a town hall style event where audience members will be encouraged to interact with a 12 member panel of industry executives.

Note: Katherine Pudi is a Senior Production Design Associate with InXpo. She attended ad:tech Chicago  last week. In this guest post, Kathy shares her thoughts and key takeaways from the conference.

I attended ad:tech Chicago, the Digital Marketing event, at Navy Pier in Chicago on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week. The conference’s objective was to connect all sides of the interactive marketing and advertising landscape.  This event was for marketing professionals from across the industry that face unprecedented challenges trying to keep up with evolving technology and doing more with less.

I arrived at the event on Tuesday afternoon and walked through the exhibit hall which showcased about 54 exhibitors. The exhibit hall floor was small and narrow. While there were many booth representatives and exhibitors, the exhibit hall lacked attendees which I attribute to presentations running from 9am- 6pm both Tuesday and Wednesday.

There were many sessions available from Performance Marketing to Media and Branding. I attended several presentations over the 2-day event. All of the presentations were full and in some cases, there was standing room only. Overall, the event proved that education is REALLY the most important part of an event and everything else is secondary.

I mainly attended sessions under the Performance Marketing track. Here are some of the notes I took during the presentations:

Presentation: Social CRM: Leveraging Social Media Platforms to Build Relationships and Drive Sales

Christopher Marriott, VP Global Managing Director, Acxiom Digital began this session with a couple nice

• “Consumers trust each other more than they trust you”
• “Marketing is a faucet with each customer as a spigot”

He also placed online users into 4 categories according to their activity with social media:

• Wide Neters
• Selectively Social
• Social Placeholders
• Getting Started

Stats on the users:

• 30-50% – spam blockers
• 20% – pop-up blockers
• 58% – regularly delete tracking cookies

He ended his presentation with…“online conversations persist forever and are global…”

Michael Kahn, Senior VP Marketing, Performics presented next and had began his presentation with some facts from Comscore

Facebook is the 4th largest site in the world– 24 million unique visitors in the month of June 09’ alone.
Twitter had 44.5 unique visitors worldwide in June 09’.

Evolving Practices for Engaging Consumers through Social Media. Michael Kahn’s 12 tactics:

1. Listen to How Consumers Talk about their products. Social Listening informs.
2. Talk to Consumers, Face to Face
3. Brand yourself as expert – the Go to Resource. i.e.) – H&R Block – Facebook/Twitter – http://facereviews.com/2008/04/15/hr-block-has-social-media-savvy/
4. Monitor and respond to customer service issues
5. Manage Reputation, React Quickly to Crisis
6. Create Massive Conversations about your brand. i.e.)-Threadless.com – tshirt design contest – live contest day 275,000 visitors
7. Social Sites for SERP (Search Engines Results Page) Domination
8. Optimize Facebook Ads to perform just like search
9. Micro-target Facebook ads at specific users (by location, age, education, sex etc…)
10. Engage Consumers w/ Custom Apps – sweepstakes
11. Tweet Coupons & Deals to sell products i.e.) – Dell – coupon codes
12. Create more engaging display ads i.e.) Juicy Juice on Facebook

Joe Abella from Draft FCB who shared his story about the KFC Grilled Chicken launch

KFC teamed up with Oprah for a free meal giveaway, KFC offered America the chance to download and print a coupon for a free meal, including two pieces of their new Kentucky Grilled Chicken.

The site was hammered with so many requests that not everyone was able to claim their free coupon. When the lucky ones who were able to print their coupons attempted to redeem them at KFCs around the country they were turned away.

KFC used social media outlets to issue apologies and to re-issue new coupons. On YouTube – Roger Eaton the president of KFC posted an apology video (note: unable to find video – anyone have the link?). They also used Facebook and Twitter to listen to the consumers and try to remedy the situation.

The last presenter was Laurie Barkman VP of Online Marketing – The Art Institutes EDMC. She spoke about the challenges of rising media costs, competitive landscape and funnel conversion.

Presentation: Yahoo! Sponsored Workshop: Understanding the Drivers to Video Consumption – An Original Research Study

• Video Usage is highest from 18 – 55 yrs. Old
• Know your audience.
• Short clips matter.

Video is not typically for B to B market. More for Brand to Women/Men.

• Online Video Consumption: 8hrs. a month
• TV (Passive) Linear: 8hrs. a day

Video relies on engagement and quality. Two types:

• Be interruptive then get out of the way. (Larger Canvas – Memorable)
• Less intrusive message doing something around video space. (i.e- bumpers, assoc. advertising – higher click rate)

Corporate Video Usage is primarily used for: Training, Employee Info.

• Online Video Consumption – prime time online can be all day but mainly 12pm – 3pm
• Know what people are searching for – implement video to target demographics. i.e) know what people are searching for at 10pm. (brand- cream cheese – place in recipe page)
• When you have video, display ads increases your search. Optimization.
• TV – Online (hard to transfer content in short time period)

Presentation: War of the Worlds Branding vs. Technology Panel

Edwin Wong, Director of Market Research from Yahoo! Inc.

• Traditional > Brand Experience
• Obsessive Measurement Syndrome: data every moment more about #’s than narrative.
• Bright Shiny Object: (augmented reality), new technology – let’s do it attitude! Should think this through for long term value, but try to be cutting edge too.
• Permissible Ignorance and Abuse of geek Power: push bright object instead of thinking of the brand.
• Embrace new technologies > Connect to the Brand

Panelist: Murray had some interesting points:

• Brands are a belief system
• Technology is a tactic
• “History does not crawl it jumps” (can’t remember who he was quoting)
• Don’t chase digital and forget to focus on the economy and social change.
• Quest for Knowledge.
• Generate Discussion rather than joining it.
• Anticipate Change

Other interesting quotes:

• Every pixel on a page is a brand statement!
• Agencies are brand guardians.

Presentation: Next Frontier in Advertising – Widgets, Apps and Viral Video

• Twitter’s success is the ability to stay connected quickly.
• Widgets: constrained area – distribute advertising
• Apps: Facebook connect – separate experience – ability to make it your own. Full Page.
• Reach > Social Apps. – i.e) Facebook Fan Page
• Social Engagement – Very high
• Visual Bookshelf – Living Social – http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2481647302
• Pay attention to the people and not the property (facebook).
• Question: Where do you fit in social media? i.e) Healthcare- runners had a marathon tied in with a charity and they used social media to market the event.

Conclusion

Based on Kathy’s notes, social media has become an accepted tool for driving a company’s brand and messages to a targeted audience. Based on the above, two points that resonated with me are understanding your audience and don’t do technology for technology’s sake.

Similarly, we advise customers to first consider their strategy, objectives and audience before jumping on the virtual event bandwagon. Like the early days of social media, virtual events are seen as more cost-effective and quicker than a “traditional, face-to-face” event. However, as we soon realized with social media, it takes effort and a concerted strategy to fully realize the benefits of virtual events.

Thanks Kathy for sharing your thoughts with everyone. If you attended ad:tech Chicago, please let us know what you thought or include a link to your summary in the comments below.

Stephen Strong–Global Director of Interactive at Alberto Culver, connoisseur of fine beers, noted bon vivant, poster boy for all that is good and right in America and a reasonably good amigo of mine–has a post on his Platforms Optional blog called “The Ad:Tech Analysis That The Man Doesn’t Want You To Read!” Rather than quoting anything from it, I think I can best sum it up by sharing a Tweet that Stephen sent me from the floor of Ad:Tech in Chicago: 

“This thing [i.e., Ad:Tech] could use a couple bloody lips.”

Let’s be frank about advertising industry conferences. At best they are delightful boondoggles (I’m looking at you, Cannes). At worst, they’re a waste of time. I grant that there is a possibility, albeit remote, that someone somewhere has learned something of value from a speech at Ad:Tech (I say this as a former speaker at the conference). Let us be generous. Maybe even a handful of people have. But in these tough economic times, agencies should be demanding a higher intellectual ROI than conferences deliver. Add up the registration fees, airfares, hotels and meals and you can get into some fairly serious money pretty quickly. This would be OK if not for the fact that most presenters are conferences are ill-prepared, ill-informed, insipid and/or uninteresting. I should note that this is not always their fault. Conference organizers have a bizarre habit of assigning topics to presenters, regardless of whether the topic matches their area of expertise. By way of example, last year at Cannes I was put on a panel about socially responsible advertising–something I  was capable of expounding on after putting in a little study, but definitely not in my wheelhouse. (By the way, there is a special place in hell for the organizer of panel discussions–perhaps the greatest time-waste conceived since the weekly status meeting.)  

I am proposing a radical alternative that I guarantee will build infinitely more intellectual capital for every agency that adopts it, while costing a tiny fraction of what they are now spending to send people to conferences all over North America and the world. And it’s stunningly simple. Build a reading room at your agency–comfy leather chairs, good lighting, no computers or iPhones allowed, lots of signs that say “no talking.” Once you’ve done this, require every single employee to spend at least eight hours per year in it reading books assigned by his or her supervisor. The reading room must be treated as inviolable. Neither client calls nor nastygrams from accounting about incomplete time sheets may be allowed to breach its threshold. Do this and the people who emerge from the room will in every single case be more valuable than the ones who went in.

Funny thing–the people who actually have something worthwhile to say eventually get around to writing it down. The mere act of writing something down almost invariably means it is more thought-out, better argued, and more complete than the alternative we get in spoken form. Proclaiming this is heresy, of course, in the age of the image and presentation. Yet I am not about to argue that image and presentation are unimportant. What I will argue, however, is that the people who have spent time reading, absorbing and learning the wisdom contained in the great books written about advertising over a period of hours (rather than being exposed to lesser thoughts for a matter of minutes) will in every case be better prepared to leverage what they know in their work and share what they know in their own presentations. 

So if your objective is merely to reward your people, keep sending them to conferences in Vegas, Austin or Dubai. But if your objective is to make them better and more valuable, tell them to sit down, shut up and read.

The results of a new study are pretty telling in regards to the  influence that brands engaging customers through social media platforms are actually having on customers. Women in particular.

Information gleaned from the study, “Women & Brands Online: ‘The Digital Disconnect’ indicates that 75% of 1,000 women queried are uninfluenced by social networking channels when it comes to making purchases.

And this snippet is even more telling:

While exceptionally engaged, they are overwhelmingly uninfluenced, and often “turned off,” by brands in this space.

Wow. So you could be highly engaging with your nice offers, coupons, info on upcoming sales and information about the product and still have little to no influence on what is purchased. So what’s a brand to do?

Here’s a quote from Matt Wise, President of Q Interactive:

“There lives a growing impetus for marketers – especially those working with Fortune 500 CPG brands who enjoy a majority female customer base, to build a better connection with women in the dynamic social media landscape. “We know women are social creatures and highly active in mediums like Facebook, where they now outnumber men.”

Here are some additional results of the study:

• 75 percent of women are “more active” in social networking than last year
• More than half (54 percent) visit social networking sites at least once per day
• Yet 75 percent share that social networking sites “not really” or “not at all” influence what they buy

They are being engaged, however and to me that is a good thing because a connection is being made based on a conscious decision to associate with the brand in that particular space.  The preferred results could come later, and I wonder what kinds of ideas will emerge to build that better connection Mr. Wise suggests.

The complete study findings are being presented today at Ad:Tech Chicago.  I wish I was there. If you come across any video or presentations related to this study, please share.

This will be our first stand at ad;tech, just wondered what advice and guidance other exhibitors or visitors have?