Advertising 2.0 - mashing Ads, Attention and a touch of Arrogance?

Went along to the Advertising 2.0 Mashup last night, as Interactive Advertising is something we have done quite a lot of work in so its always interesting to hear other people's views.

As an evening it was best described as Good but Curates Eggy rather than Excellent (do I have to fire myself for printing that now

The Good Bits were:

- A good tramp over the modern interactive media scene by Dave Burrows of Yahoo

- Esther Dyson - didn't get to say a lot but was very sharp in her observations

- Some of what the other speakers said - or in some cases didn't say in response to questions

- The chat afterwards as always

The Not - So - Good bits

- Not really enough time to answer audience questions or tease out some of the issues

- Some of what some speakers said seemed a bit platitudinous (hard to avoid I'm sure)....and sometimes a bit arrogant I thought - the customer is clearly still seen as a mug to be flogged mercilessly in some segments of Adland, rather than interacted with. My favourite – from a guy who popped up off the floor (who were those guys, couldn't see them)….”assuming we can get over privacy concerns, a (describe your bright new world here - large campaigns I think) emerges". I think Privacy is going to bite a lot of these plans very, very hard.

- Simon Grice (eTribes) telling me that Mashup was going to go to TechCrunchUK after this - with all the other hoo ha going on its not just TCUK that is being impacted here in the UK, its quite a few of the other social networks.

Taking out some interesting observations from the evening - David first:

- Some of the stats behind Behavioural Targeting - making ads relevant increases takeup by up to 350% in some cases

- "Indirect Advertising" - Flickr is advertising cameras by exposing what people use...I can see this going to several orders of indirectness

- "Giving something back" - Nike teaches dance steps on Ad via current pop stars / slebs, everyone wears Nike in the ad - inference only. Content built for product placement.

Esther Dyson's description of Adland was pithy - built on 15% of user billings, costs are going away and users are picking the Ads now - this changes where the power lies in the supply chain. People will soon start / are starting to realise this, and will sell or barter their attention data. This means that you have to have something worth having - w(h)ither Branding of the me too products?

Andy Bell of Islandoo noted that the Web is lousy at Brand Building, as it tends to disaggregate customer demand to many small specifics - hence the need to create brandable events on-web (which of course is what Islandoo does).

John Taysom of Mediagraft noted that in 1995 we were all going to be journalists when Mosaic came out, didn't happen, why do we think it will happen today with blogging - good quality wins in the end. Not sure about that - Websites were still intrinsically "megaphone media", but as blogs are interactive, they are possibly a new type of social network - see my comments on this here

He did make two very good points though, that I think need to thought through in a later post:

- ads are essentially 3rd party micropayments (I agree, we did some work on this for mobile ad funded micropayments, and they don't attract the friction of real micropayments)

- advertising is a contract, and interactivity is changing the terms - you have to trade something for attention (shades of what Esther said)

- Christina’s (didn’t catch her surname) main line of thinking was the issues of finding all the content out there, but she did add a twist I haven't heard before in that she suspected it this was more about the brands having the problem finding us, not us finding the content via our recommend / rate / review social media.

Ably compered by Michael Bayler, some sharp questions but the Q & A was quite rushed I thought (note to organisers - I think most people who come to these things on a wet, cold winters evening are very engaged, so let the Q&A flow), but its interesting about the gist of the questions:

Gist 1 - what do the various components in the Ad Value chain do now, what are there new roles - clearly some worried people - will PR agencies rule in a social media world?

Gist 2 - Long Tail vs the Middle...does Google rule the Long Tail for ever, and is there any money between the heads and tails?

Gist 3 - Ad quality in an interactive world - how will the 30 second pre-roll work etc etc. Answer - the structure wont change radically overnight, we will still have banners, pre-rolls etc - but we just won't watch cr*p ads anymore, period - and its a good idea to make sure the good ones are relevant

Saw Marc Cantor, was going to talk to him about not being able to connect a PC to a big TV....but he'd gone

I'll finish off with Esther Dyson, asked about her view of the US vs EU Venture Capital community. In essence, US VC's back "insane ideas" like, oh, YouTube or MySpace early and often - you get funding, but so do lots of other people. Its far, far harder to get funding in Europe for any New New Thing, but if you can its great as there is usually no competition.

Hmmmm...take all the froth about Web TV now, yet it was hard to get people in Europe to look at it a year ago. I think systemically the US approach is far more likely to breed winners in any space as their plays will be out there gaining customers and doing the Darwinian evolution thing.