I spent two exciting days at Ad:Tech in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, along with 11,000 other digital marketers. It was total immersion in the state of the advertising art, circa 2010. Needless to say Don Draper would not feel at home either on the exhibit floor or the speaker forums. It’s even a far cry from marketing as we knew it just ten years ago.
Interestingly, the exhibits were mostly about ‘Tech‘ while the speakers were mostly about ‘Ad’. It was as if two conferences were happening simultaneously.
First the ‘tech’. Digital technology means that ‘media’ is defined in a whole new way. It’s still about content, but that content is more targeted and interactive. A case study on the panel I moderated by Alloy Marketing (alloy.tv) and their client, LG Mobile, featured a series of 11 websites titled “Haute & Bothered“. The series generated so much comment thru different viral channels via YouTube, RockYou and Meez.com that it will soon begin a second season. Geoff Ramsey of EMarketer.com described a new kind of video from Coincident.tv where viewers can literally friend characters as the playing, as with the ‘hypertrailer’ for Glee. Coincident.tv has essentially developed an XML-based metadata framework dubbed Cue Point Language that makes it possible to add additional content, links or even various types of actions to any predefined point of a video.
Placement of media is also high tech. Advertising networks respond to advertiser queries in just 50 milliseconds, with the highest bidder winning exposure. The ads we see are determined by who we are, the context and what that viewing is ‘worth’ to those bidding. This targeting precision is something the Mad Men-era ad guys never dreamed of.
Finally, attention, interest, desire and action (the old AIDA model) can all happen simultaneously with digital media, so everything is measurable. We know what works instantly or close to instantly. As Sarah Fay of DMG Media, the owner of Ad:Tech, the iMedia Summits and the CMO Summits puts it, “Data is the New Black. Data management
is becoming ‘the’ key ingredient to planning and managing effective advertising program.”
On the ‘Ad’ side of ‘Ad:Tech’, creativity is center stage and ‘insights’ are the new strategy.
Ironically, creative ideas for digital advertising seem to be less about science and more about art. (In this respect, Don Draper would feel right at home!) It would appear that digital execution makes strategy, if not less important, certainly less connected to execution. Now, speed of execution is everything. In a world of instant results and low or no media cost, pre-testing is irrelevant. You can literally ‘just do it’. In his keynote, Jaime Cohen Szulc, CMO, Levi Strauss & Co. made this point explicit when he recommended strategy and execution be handled separately, by different agencies. His reasoning? Both have become ‘too complicated’ to be handled by one agency, it now takes an ‘agency network’, each ‘playing to position’ to create an effective campaign’.
I have been in marketing long enough to know that it takes both strategy and execution matter, and they work best when they work together. So I expect there to be a course correction sometime in the near future, with greater focus on both strategy and media technology. This may come sooner rather than later, once marketers realize there is little more incrementally to be gained from ever finer ways of optimizing media buys. Dynamic Logic, which has researched over 300 online campaigns for efficacy came to this conclusion in a recent report for the 4A’s. “When it comes to digital advertising, a lot of time is spent choosing Web sites, ad sizes, formats, targeting and other factors. Maximizing creative quality, is the foremost driver of ad effectiveness—even more important than targeting, ad size or ad format.”
