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June 24, 2004
AdTech notes from John Zagula
If you care about internet marketing, read this post. John Zagula posted this earlier, but has agreed to have it cross posted here.
AdTech Forum - Is the bubble back?
Just got back from AdTech Forum. Was supposedly much bigger, hypier and more well funded, and attended than before.
But hey, at least I brought home some nice tchotchkes. My kids especially liked the flashing bouncing ball from Who’s Calliing, the weird belt clip light from Atlas Search and the frisbee thing from Digital Envoy. The little flashing light thingee from Google was cool but too sharp for play. And honestly the little sticky-note book from AOL was not good enough, they should do better. Oh, yeah, and I didn’t win ANY of the many raffles for free iPods and TiVos. What a rip. (Strange, I got much better swag from an insurance industry conference I went to recently)
Oh, but I guess that was not what I was there for. Sorry. I’ll get to the actual content now.
Who was there? Tons of vendors like DoubleClick, Revenue Science, GoToast, CasaleMedia, Atlas DMT. Consultants and agencies like SBI Razorfish and Advertising.com. Media owners, aggregators, brokers etc like Claria, Tribal Fusion, Fastclick, and Kanoodle, and of course, the company everyone wanted to be like, Google. Just to name a very few.
The Big themes: accountability, integration, the death of TV, contextual vs. behaviorial targeting, pay for performance, measurement, measurement, measurement - CPA vs. CPM vs. ROI vs. eieio, other stuff like promotional and other marketing vehicles. And most importantly, why is online still such a small % of the total ad spend?
What’s Hot supposedly: analytics, consulting $, SMS marketing, DVRs shaking up the world, metrics, mixed media schedules and planning, broad-reach/interactive integration and planning, local, email, search and more search
What’s Not supposedly: interactive TV, streaming ads, promotions.
See the VC discussion for more on this. Everyone of course wanted to know what Mark Kvamme of Sequoia (Yahoo and Google of course) had to say. Which was really good, but the other panelists had a bunch of other observations. Like deal prices are starting to get scarey again, also that we've really only seen the beginning of the shift to online ad spend, about how important local is but how high the cost/advertiser acquired. About how wireless is super cool and could leapfrog PC/internet for streaming video.
Biggest Gap: strangest thing to me at least was how little attention blogging as a business opportunity got, even after all the Billg talk. Most pooh poohed it as not investable, needing an ad model, and needing editorial quality control. Humph. Well, at least Mary Hodder found some enthusiasm about blogs there.
Other, final impressions: Lots of buzz words like “new information economy” “hyper-changing” “leverage.” Lot's more optomism and excitement but I sensed an undertone of Vienna before the Anschluss, waiting to see if the shoe drops. Really nice to see a guy like Mike Windsor take the whammy out of a bunch of the claptrapier stuff said. Favorite quotes are from him.
"It's about money. Remember that. So then we have to go where the money is. The billion dollar not million dollar budgets. And they are with broad reach clients not interactive clients. Until interactive is a significant and regular part of the ad program we will always be fighting an uphill battle." Also "Online represents less than 10% of the budget but more than 90% of the analysis. Why, because it can be analysed. Not because the analysis really tells you any more about the true ROI of the effort or how it performs relative to anything else."
Posted by Martin at June 24, 2004 2:57 PM
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