I just got back from speaking at and attending the ad:tech conference in Singapore last Thursday and Friday. Ad:tech is a digital marketing conference that attracts interactive agencies, clients, brand specialists and media planners. This is the 11th year of ad:tech conferences
Here are some random notes that were either sufficiently disturbing or interesting enough to merit being jotted down on the back of my speaker's badge. Also included are some hit-or-miss inspirations that occured to me during the event:
- Vast wasteland?: 10 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each hour.
- Is there any room left?: Within 2 years, business cards will list social networks just like the list email addresses and mobile phone numbers today.
- Time to learn a new skill: Before long, 40-60% of all traffic on the internet will be video.
- Life lesson #258: There were technical glitches with my presentation on social networks and self-segmentation. Always check your presentation before showtime.
- New business idea?: PR, digital marketing, media planners, advertising agencies and other partners are generating lots of measurements to enable accountability. However, clients are having a difficult time both integrating that data and correlating it to their brand or corporate KPIs. There is an increasing need for a centralized "dashboard agency," which would provide the necessary integration among multiple sets of numbers and linkages to corporate goals.
- Not sleep?:18-25 year olds were asked what they would do with an extra 15 minutes a day. A healthy percentage said they would spend it on social networks.
- Harbinger title of the future: One of the keynote speakers was Brad Garlinghouse of Yahoo!. His title: Vice President of Communications and Communities.
- What's tired:
- "Positioning:" Amazingly, I did not hear this relic from the 1970s mentioned once.
- 360-degree marketing: The audience laughed when this term was heard.
- 1:1 marketing: Experts agreed that failures with 1:1 marketing were making it difficult to sell segmentation today.
- Viral marketing: Usually referred to in the sense of a prehistoric ancestor to social networking
What's wired:
- Engagment: Every speaker mentioned it at least five times. However, some speakers only mentioned in the sense that "we want customers to engage with us." Engagement must be a two-way street.
- Measurement: Once measurement was a dirty word among creative-driven executives and agencies. Now the entire marketing world seeks to be data-driven.
- Entertainment: The primary tool for engaging with consumers on the Internet.
- Mobile marketing: After a decade of hype, everyone kept promising that yes, really, I swear, this is the year that mobile marketing takes off.
- iPhone: Finally, a mobile on-ramp to the Internet and all it has to offer.
- Integration: Every offline campaign must have an online component.
- A lot of pokes: There are 530 million users on social networks worldwide.
- So that's why you need 15 minutes extra a day: 20% of all Internet users have visited a social network within the last 30 days.
- Three types of media: Owned (internal), bought (advertising, etc) and earned (WOM, etc.)
- Emperor-has-no-clothes speaker insight: Why do we have campaigns with a beginning and an end? It just requires so much energy and money to start a new campaign. With social networks, promotion never ends.
- New buzzword to learn: ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline).
- Best quote heard: "A lot of companies think social networking means, 'We want you the consumer to tell us how great our products are.' -- Josh Sklar, Global Chief Creative Agency, BLUE
- Best case history: Coke Zero in Australia. Coke tried to pave the way for a product introduction by mimicking an "underground" slackster/hipster movement. Of course, it was outed. Lesson: Always be authentic.
- Most overused case history: The UGM effort to promote Tahoe. It backfired when environmentalists used the UGM effort to blast the Chevy gas-guzzler. However, Chevrolet won brownie points by letting the critical videos remain online.
- Sign of times: Nestle in Philippines upped its digital marketing budget from 9% to 25% this year.
- Note to conference organizers: When interviewing keynote speakers, ensure that the questions are not longer than the answers. Attendees want to hear the keynoter, not the organizer.
- New boy toy: After the conference I bought the Creative Labs version of the hot-hot-hot Flip video camera. The New York Times called it "one of the most significant electronics products of the year." If this takes off like the iPod, pretty soon 80% of the traffic on the Internet will be video.
