Advertising Week 2009 – Day One
Advertising Week is underway in New York and as vibrant as ever, with more events to attend and more people to meet than could be accomplished in the span of an entire career, let alone a single week. Highlights from day one included editorial coverage of Moms Media announcement and lots of interest from both publishers and advertisers. Based on initial feedback, it seems like pretty good timing to launch a vertical ad network aimed at reaching moms online.
Great ValueClick Media workshop panel on “How Leading Advertisers Use Ad Networks to Achieve Brand Marketing Objectives.” A BIG THANK YOU to Doug Chavez of Del Monte Foods, Erin Hunter of comScore, Steve Ustaris of Studiocom and Chris Arens of Catalyst:SF.
It was great seeing everyone on ValueClick Media’s NY team — what an impressive group of veteran online advertising professionals. Thanks also to IAB MIXX and OMMA Global conferences for all of your hard work in hosting two first class intustry events…if only you would do it together again!
Morning keynote #1
Along with the theme of “Fueling Advertising’s Creative Revolution,” Adobe SVP Global Marketing Ann Lewnes posed a challenge for all stakeholders in the online advertising ecosystem:
Media – Create experiences that leverage the medium and crack the nut on monetization.
Agency – Evangelize the medium and proactively push the boundaries of what is possible.
Clients – Be open to exploring more options and encourage your companies to overcome resistance
Flash Platform Services – Gigya partnership and tracking widgets — “thinking outside the rectangle.”
Augmented Reality – offline/online integration – cool demo of a direct mail piece, which when held in front of a webcam creates a 3D online experience. Holds interesting possibilities for making offline content more creative online.
Vision for Omniture integration and the ability to track creative executions through to monetization – sounds like a bright future for Flash cookies to me.
Adaptive Layout Technologies – Times Reader 2.0 flash player demo – adapts content to any size screen, ads also adapt automatically to content. Tools for developers create desktop apps using Flash/HTML
Keynote #2
Microsoft – Yusuf Mehdi, SVP Online Services spoke of “Misses, homeruns and game changers” and Microsoft’s view of the future.
I’m not sure if it’s an internal product mantra or something Mr. Mehdi devised for today’s session, but was inspired by these sound principles, which referenced as he presented Project Natal and Bing:
1) Be Authentic – Million Dollar Home Page
2) Be opportunistic and responsive – Ashton Kutcher
3) Relentless measurement and optimization – Zappos.com
4) Be social – Starbucks
5) Ads are content – Burger King “Freak Out”
The Bing demo was useful/relevant and served as a reminder that despite the bazillions spent on making me aware of the brand I have yet to type it into a browser (note to self: check out Bing!).
Bing is trying to deliver unmet needs in search and provide more intuitive results considering:
Imprecise Results – 25% of clicks lead to ‘back’
Refinement – 42% of sessions need refinement
Lengthy tasks – 50% of time spent on long queries
Demo included cool visual search demo with examples including female senators, U.S. government line of succession, handbags and cameras. Also impressive, though not elaborated on were some impressive reporting features for advertisers based on H/M/L usage.
Project Natal – Next generation of computing and how humans interact with computers. Xbox human controller will be first. Think Wii but without a controller. This much I could get my head around, until he introduced the “Dag” (aka Digital Assitant Guide) a creepy Max Hedroom-like video avatar who was all too happy to pull up meeting notes or dial up a video conference, but was unbelievable that he would add much value to my computing experience. Don’t get me wrong. Overall, it was the most impressive, innovative, well-executed and entertaining demo I’ve seen in a long time — just slightly ahead of its time.
