ad:tech 2008 supahstah !
My quest for conquering all (mobile) media continues unabated (sorta). I’m fresh off my first panel speaking gig, at the 2008 ad:tech show in Chicago.
Ad:tech is the trade conference for digital marketing wonks of all stripes. “Digital” in this particular context means putting ads all over the internet: SEO, paid search placements, flash web advertising, television 2.0 (whatever that means), email marketing (the bastards) and for the past couple of years, mobile marketing - in particular banner ads on WAP sites.
Mickey Alam Khan, the editor in chief of the Mobile Marketer news site was heading up a panel discussion about the future of mobile marketing and invited Action Engine to participate. Provided, of course, we were sandwiched between actual customers and not slideware presentations. This wasn’t a problem at the end of the day, since the panel included Richard Trumble, the Exec Director at Wall Street Journal Digital (a customer of Action Engine) as well as Eric Eller, SVP of products and marketing at Millennial Media (a recent marketing partner of Action Engine). I sat between them.
I really was not supposed to be the talking head for this show, the honor was supposed to fall on Scott Silk’s shoulders (Action Engine’s erstwhile CEO) but at the last minute he had to drop out. But as any PR person worth their salt will tell you, dropping out of a speaking gig is verboten. Getting on a panel is free publicity after all, and finding a slot requires more than a little begging. Since Scott couldn’t go, the opportunity rolled my way (helped by the fortuitous sick leave of the SVP of Sales, the unavailability of the VP of Marketing, and the absence of our usual other talking head — but hey, every little bit helps). The problem was, I didn’t have much in the way of prep-time in 26 hours I had from agreeing to go until the time I took the stage. So in the time I had, I banged out a list of talking points, memorized them and did my best to sound informed and spontaneous. Here’s what I had to say:
=======================
AD:TECH TALKING POINTS
=======================
State of the (mobile) advertising industry (at least from the perspective of mobile applications)
- As I see it, mobile advertising is bound up in four parameters: Who is being advertised to, Where you are reaching them, How you are getting to them and What you are doing to get your message out.
- (Who) The landscape is large, mobile subscriber market is by and large saturated; everyone who wants a cellphone has one. This is a great addressable population.
- (Where) Cellphones are new the ubiquitous and addictive device, it’s called a crackberry for a reason (iPhone users are coming along shortly with their own substance abuse allusion as well.)
- (How) WAP has basically been figured out, it’s now the de facto lowest common denominator experience. But the fact is WAP *is* the lowest common denominator experience … getting positioning on that could be similar to having placements on a blog, not on the New York Times site.
- (What) We’ve seen an amazing up take in mobile application installation. The iPhone app store had 10 million downloads in its first weekend, as a result, carriers (who are not AT&T) are scrambling to figure out how to replicate that sort of experience with their subscribers.
- In getting these applications out, the market has started to see a growing user expectation: content is “free.” In fact Wired magazine had an issue with the cover story all about the price point of “free.” This is carrying into the mobile universe as well.
- At the CTIA trade show AT&T Fast Pitch I did for Mobile MySI, Scott Williams the VP of Mobile told the AT&T panel “Users just won’t pay for content, they see it as a free good” as a result they had to monetize in other ways. That way is advertising.
This is being validated by the entrees of the big web marketers (speaking in the subsidized application universe, not the WAP universe) of Yahoo and Google. - Yahoo has the Go3 platform, which explicitly includes a markup tag called
<ad>. Google Android is open source and free, but all Google applications are free. They aren’t being wholly altruistic; a $200 million plus investment is going to draw dividends via advertising.
What makes mobile advertising hard?
- Mobile advertising is hard like a weekend long jigsaw puzzle, not hard like vector calculus. Technical issues are being addressed by the mobile industry for things like transcription, management and all that.
- The difficulty is in an advertising industry’s workflow. It’s dedicated to print and to a lesser extent web marketing. But banner ads on the Wall Street Journal homepage are not immediately repurposeable to running on a WAP site, they’ll need rework to match MMA standards.
- There are also rich opportunities, such as video pre-roll. With larger phone screens, the experience can be very compelling. But resizing existing video isn’t a great solution – there was a reason why television watches failed in the 1980s (remember those?) Image quality wasn’t great… nobody wants to watch Kerry Wood pitch a no-hitter when the baseball is the size of a single pixel.
How can mobile marketing succeed?
- Consider mobile marketing to be its own thing entirely and build a process around that. Don’t make it like the web but different, or like television, but different. It’s a complete universe onto itself.
- Millennial Media has done great innovation work with its “serial thriller” concept, a storytelling ad format. Now make that work for video, audio and text. “Make it work!”
UPDATE: Mickey published an article regarding the panel discussion (sadly my title is listed incorrectly, since I had run out of all my business cards). The article includes almost nothing of what I had to say — which isn’t much of a surprise actually the folks there were more interested in SMS and WAP advertising than in-application advertising — but at least Action Engine got three mentions. The bulk of the article was devoted to an almost transcript-like coverage of what Rich Trumble had to say. Oh well, on to media event number three !
3 Responses to “ad:tech 2008 supahstah !”
Leave a Reply
ywaroni…
50 Caliber For Sale …
exevejyx…
pictures of nicole brown …
Buy:Valtrex.Accutane.Actos.Arimidex.Lumigan.Petcam (Metacam) Oral Suspension.Zyban.Nexium.Zovirax.Prevacid.Synthroid.Retin-A.100% Pure Okinawan Coral Calcium.Prednisolone.Human Growth Hormone.Mega Hoodia….