Ad:tech London - Day One

Was at ad:tech London today and will be there tomorrow - we are doing some client work and it was a good place to meet some of the people we are interviewing, so I am going to the talks where I can too. I'll just note some things that were highlights for me in the sessions I was at - as I was not in all the sessions all the time, these are not complete views.

Keynote - Alan Rutherford - VP Global Media, Digitas

Most of the stuff discussed was fairly well known in the interactive ad community, but Alan did have some thoughts on the impact of "Web 2.0" technologies on marketing - aka "marketing 2.0" and emerging lessons from how it needed to re-engage with consumers in terms of:

- Pop Culture - talk to people about their lives, not just what you want to flog 'em

- Entertainment Delivery - ensure there is a "value exchange" - ie they get something of benefit for their attention

- Social Networks - connect "brand peers" through the brand - he noted PR was probably the only worthwhile marketing skill base in this space

Agencies and Digital Technology - Strategic Vision

Aka "how to get further up the greasy pole if influence" - the point was made that the "tech" bit of Advertising is having far higher levels of executive engagement today, but this is short term and will recede again when it becomes part of the mix (The panel members are on the website linked to in the first paragraph above, will fill in later when more time allows it). The only way to get higher up the food chain is to make a bigger impact - eg make inroads into China.

In reality online Ads so far are just a new branch of direct marketing, but "filmic" media over broadband is genuinely a new medium.

Mobile Advertising Ecosystem

Japan and Korea, with end to end standards in the value chain and high capability handsets are light years ahead ( see our recent post here on this matter). In the west we are left scrabbling with low bandwidth, low interoperability, lousy economics etc etc.

There are emerging "opportunities" like location based services, vouchers, mobile TV (the same ones as last year....) - but a lot of work still has to be done to wotk out how to advertise so as not to annoy customers and create compelling ads. There seems to be a large gulf between what mobile advertising players think will happen and what research says users will actually put up with.

Another big message - need to build audience first, then monetise

TV & Entertainment - Strategic Vision

The industry is undergoing a shift as the separation of content production and distribution accelerates, driving the requirement to operate across multiple platforms and for many parts of the value chain to have to understand the Ad driven model much more closely (many have not been exposed to it, Sky noting that 2 years ago online advertising was part of the marketing mix, now its part of the distribution mix).

There is still huge experimentation with what sort of Ads work on various screen sizes and lengths of media, and in Social Networks, and some areas which are allowed in movies (like product placement) are still not allowed on TV. There was a worry expressed that players like Google are way ahead of regulators - and thus regulated players.

TV is not going away anytime soon, but will need to look hard at its value delivery models

Social Networking & Community sites - Strategic Vision

Quite a lot in this one, needs a more detailed post really but in essence 70% of "the conversation about the brand" is people talking to each other, 30% with the brand. Advertisers have to have a reason to be in a community, can't just mouth off - need to contribute to the raison d'etre of the groups they want to converse with, and actually bring something to the table. Can backfire on insensitive companies, for eg in Netherlands communities are uniting to resist things like large out of town supermarkets.

Overall though, in all the presentations one theme came back time and again...metrics. The industry just has not sorted out the online metrics it needs (and believes). This needs a post on its own, will do one after Day 2 tomorrow