Monday, 20 June. Review for The Re-Calibration of Form and Function Online by AOL, presented by Tim Armstrong, CEO – AOL, and Arianna Huffington – Co-founder, Editor-in-Chief – The Huffington Post.

Huffington Post: Adrianna opened up, she’s extremely charismatic, funny, and overall a great entertainer. Overall she provided a lot more entertainment than good content, but that’s part being up there.

Her big idea: values online should mimic values offline. She gave a brief history of the Internet and claimed it has been very immature, and asked what shou

ld the Internet be when it grows up? All online brand experiences should focus on 4 pillars:

1. Trust: brands need trust 2. Authenticity: is like pornography – you know it when you see it 3. Engagement: around their values, not their products 4. Pursuit of happiness

…. that was it – very enlightening!

AOL: Then Tim took the stage, here comes the good part. Tim shows state of the art research and studies performed on aol.com using eye tracking to fully understand behavior, attention, reactions to visual stimulus, and A/B testing performed by changing key content units on the page. The result, staggering, Tim concludes that the future of the Internet and effective monetization models will consist of migrating from old fashion traditional banners to new improved bigger banners. Yes! By changing the format, adding more richness, better experience, more video, and making it longer, you can effectively increase the noise to effectively disrupt the attention of the web users and make him look at the ad. That Tim described as Ads with human emotion.

Then to try to make this statement a little more appealing, the rephrases it as brands will simply rent 20% of AOL’s portal space, so it’s not technically a banner anymore, it’s a space where they can embed rich content. Much better, phew, I thought the future of the Internet are better banners.

Ok, now finally for some real business value. Studies show that 83% of consumers use fewer than 30 sites a month; they use 20 fixed brands, and 10 rotating brands. I found this insight quite useful, makes you rethink the entire SEO and long-tail strategy. So that’s AOL’s strategy? Let’s acquire all the top brands to make sure we’re always part of the top 20.

Finally some words of wisdom: give creativity a space in the web and stop taking orders from the silicon valley.

Such statement was intended to please a creative audience, but I totally disagree. There is much to learn from the silicon valley, and the future of experiences is a marriage of brands, creativity, and entrepreneurship.

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Monday, 20 June. Review for Beyond the Horizon by PHD, presented by Mark Holden , Global Strategy and Planning Director.

Intro: The session was consistent with the overall 2011 theme of marketing technology – the role of technology impact in advertising, marketing, and customer experience. Mark did a great job describing a bunch of new tech and putting them in perspective of why they matter for the new consumer.

He opened up stating that there are 1.2 billion people in social networks – no surprise, but the next 1 billion will enter through mobile. We all knew how important mobile is, this is just a reassurance.

Next he explained that what drives technology is us, individuals, humanity. Technology is a human invention to solve human problems, being driven strictly by human needs. Therefore, technology is a consequence of human needs and desires – and what is driving humans? What drives humanity is need for abundance: we want everything, everyone, everywhere – and we won’t stop until we get it.

Following the intro, Mark jumped into multiple categories of technical innovations, grouped by infrastructure, interface, and internet.

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After my World After Advertising keynote, I had a great interview by Horizon which came out in a print edition back in March 2011. I took me some time to get in translated, but it was totally worth the wait — they did a great job capturing SapientNitro’s thinking on marketing, media, and technology.

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SapientNitro mastermind Rob Gonda talks about marketing in the digital age and the declining importance of mass media By Santiago Campillo-Lundbeck

At the World After Advertising conference in Düsseldorf, Rob Gonda tried to shock the public by saying that traditional advertising is dead. In an interview, though, Gonda, who is SapientNitro’s Global Head of Creative Technology, gave us a more complex picture of the communication revolution sparked off by the internet and how marketing has to respond.

Horizon: Your job is to find opportunities worldwide for SapientNitro to creatively use technology in marketing. Why has technology become a strategic issue in digital marketing all of a sudden?

RG: People’s relationship with technology is the critical issue. Technology changes our habits and so it’s only logical that technology also changes the way we see brands. Technology puts new filters between customers and brands.  Read More »

The Digital Buzz blog posted today a new campaign by M&M called M&M’s Internet Invasion Game. The game was “developed” by BBDO Denmark, and there are tons of learnings we could get out of this.

1. The M&M’s Space Heroes is actually a straight up copy of the Kick Ass bookmarklet by Erik Andersson, also covered by Wired among other respectable publications. BBDO’s code acknowledges it was inspired by it, though it’s just a copy with new graphics. This is a smart move by BBDO, taking into account they probably did not spend more than a day on development of the microsite and new graphic assets, and charged M&M a substantial margin for coming up with the idea. The code was open source has an Apache 2 license, granting anyone full rights to copy, modify, and distribute for any commercial use, thus BBDO didn’t do anything illegal, it was actually smart — not creative, but smart.

2. Deployment strategy: the code was not optimized, minified, or even deployed to a CDN. I would have expected an agency dealing with Mars food to be a little more thoughtful of brand performance.

3. Tracking. Perhaps the most important point I’d like to make. Due to the fact that bookmarklets are simply plain JavaScript code that runs on a browser, it makes it a little less trivial to track, but far from impossible. Technically speaking, they could have modified the code to add pixel images, a JavaScript timer to update it every few seconds, and could have gathered full analytics tracking total games, unique games, geo-location of players, time spent on site, top referrers, etc.

You should always use a simple rule of thumb: if you can’t measure it, don’t do it.

It is not hard to predict that Mars will ask BBDO how many people played this game? How much time they’ve spent? What’s the most popular site where it was played? How many people shared it? How many people talked about it? … and most likely they won’t get any answers.

So what’s the moral of the story?

• It’s hard to come up with purely innovative ideas and you should always welcome creative mash-ups and different uses of existing experiences (full copycat perhaps not so much).
• No matter what you do, always try to improve based on previous cycles, add value, enhance the experience, bring something unique to the table.
• Always, but always, track and measure results.

I was asked to give the opening keynote at The World After Advertising conference in Düsseldorf, Germany, back in November 2010; where I presented a PoV on the future of advertising and the digital landscape – focusing heavily on user experience driven by data & technology.

The keynote covers relations between people and brands, the evolution of the digital consumer, the evolution of technology and how it changed us, an introduction to contextual computing, adaptive experiences, the Internet of Things, and a few predictions for the next 5 years.

The events was recorded, but I have not managed to get the official video — luckily for us, someone at the front row recorded the entire keynote from their phone.

Find below the full video recording, slides, and an amazing infographic an artist made live while listening to my keynote.

YouTube Full Video Recording:

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