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.

Original Session Description:

Digital media has long been considered a singular experience for consumers and mostly a direct response vehicle for brands. However, as content reclaims its rightful seat at the center of the platform and brands take an increasingly significant role in improving the experience, the industry must change the online environment as we know it. Join Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington as they discuss the shifting intersection of content, creativity, advertising and technology; the increasing importance of context; and ultimately outline what this brave (and brand!) new digital world can, should and will look like.

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.

Infrastructure: Fibre to the home will bring wired gigabit connections to every household. Similarly, 4g , lte, wimax will massively improve wireless connectivity. With ubiquitous broadband connectivity, there will be no more distinction between media types: HD video will download just as fast as 3d world games, music, or photos.

Connectivity combined with the growing cloud capabilities, will delegate storage and processing to the cloud, focusing devices back to graphic processing, graphic hardware acceleration, and sensors.

Interface: Oled and ultrahd will allow video 16 times better than HDTV to be displayed in a thin-almost-invisible flexible layer. Price is still prohibitive, but in the upcoming years this technology will allow video to be embedded pretty much anywhere.

Connected TVs will totally chance the dynamics of what is TV today. Addressable content – meaning it can be targeted and personalized -, a mix of current TV broadcast with the marvels of the Internet: everything is tracked, served dynamically, everyone can be a media company, publishers have direct access to the consumer.

The top experiences enabled by such mix will be embedded content, clickable content, video hot-spotting, and the already coined t-commerce for Television Commerce.

The first noticeable change will be linear TV with dynamic targeted ads, targeting the household by programs watched, demographics, or if the TV provider is also the ISP, perhaps bundle behavioral data into web usage, or if the TV is part of a gaming platform, them also get gaming and social behavioral data. Ultimately, content providers will sit in a world of data that will be used to personalize the TV watching experience.

We did not get into greater debates of what will happen to the 30-second stop, what would happen to advertising dollars, what would be the media and business model of the future.

Lastly Mark mentioned a bunch of interface techs, but didn’t get into detail for any of them: oled, graphene, audio spotlight, voice recognition, virtual personal assistants, markless AR, NFC, e-coupling. Out of these techs, you will probably see tons of buzz around AR and NFC in 2012.

Internet: This section talked about the socialization of the web and predicted that search will move from links to likes. The reasoning behind this assertion is that search will eventually become semantic, and will try to provide relevant personalized results as opposed to generic results. Tying search into the social graph and prioritizing results based on conversations, likes by social circles – or similarly +1 by Google Circles, part of their new highly popular Google+.

Additionally, the web is finally slowly moving from a massively unstructured pile of data to better organized self-descriptive objects, thanks to Facebook’s Open Graph efforts and now Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s schema.org efforts. Pages in the web will have additional metadata explaining the context behind them, as well as defining relations to other content. This will slowly have a big impact in SEO.

Other topics covered vertical search, social commerce, and gamification.

Following connectivity, the discussion naturally moved to mobile connectivity. We will rely on smart phones for what is now called real time living or just-in-time living. Every piece of information we need is always available at our fingertips, and we make real time decision, moving from from preset preplanned activities into real time experiences. And because we are making this real-time decisions, brands cannot just preplan a journey for us, they have to also adapt and engage in real-time experiences, reacting to every trigger and response.

Media agency 2016: So what does this all mean for the advertising industry? What does the media agency look like in 2016? The industry will shift from analog, dated, simple holding of a bunch of media properties to being a creative-technology led industry. Agencies will have to understand the power of technology in driving human experiences, and be able to creative and enhance these experiences. Media will be just data, and the largest agencies are already starting to invest in AMP: Audience Management Platforms.

Audience Management Platforms: Now I’ve heard multiple names for these platforms, such as CEP: Customer Experience Platform, MMP: Marketing Management Platform. Ultimately, it’s a data mart / data wharehousing platform that aggregates 360 customer data across every channel, and provides a layer of intelligence that drives personalized experiences. Content delivery, web sites, mobile apps, and media buying are nothing but layers of experience, that should be all centrally controlled by a single governing platform. This platform can hook into other contextual brokers, but I won’t get into too much detail right now. Back to Mark, he also sees this platform managing RTB: Real-Time Bidding and creative optimization; mainly meaning that it will control the time, content, and context where media is delivered.

With this shift in the media business model, we can predict that media futures exchange will become a very interesting area really soon.

Social: Mark predicts that in a few years the social media practice will be mature and in high demand, that people good at social will be superstars. I must say that people good at understanding human behavior are already superstars, and social is just the nature of humanity, and has always been part of connections planning. The discipline is simply evolving due to evolution of technology, but the roots have not changed.

Evolution of the Agency: Perhaps not so much evolution, but given that marketing is now getting the feedback loop and connected back into the brand essence, agencies will take the role of NPD: new product development.

Conclusion: At the very end of this long tech talk, Mark showed a phenomenal closing video! Very emotional, good sound and music, experiential. I will post the video as soon as I get a copy and clearance.

The session was pretty inspiring and reassured the critical role of a marketing technologist / creative technologist in the agency and client organizations.

Original Session Description:

Over the last five years the industry has seen the most dramatic changes to the world of communications. The social media revolution has fundamentally changed the fabric of society. Right now, one in every two people within the developed world is connected-up through social networks. This is resulting in to a quickening in the speed at which information, and therefore influence, is moving. More than this, PHD believes that this is changing the actual physics of how marketing works. And this rate of change is accelerating. Looking ahead this change will be driven by such things as demographic, attitudinal and psychographic shifts, and media-ownership regulation. But the biggest driver of change will of course be technology. Technology will not just be a driver of change it will be the driver of change. Technological advancements that are now on the horizon will enable the development of new marketing communications platforms through which to engage with people. New possibilities will emerge through the coming together of such as technologies as smart TVs, markerless augmented reality, enhanced voice-recognition, transparent OLED screens, haptic feedback, gesture input and NFC.

In this session PHD will explore the incredible technology that is on the horizon and project ahead on what the exciting possibilities are for marketing and advertising.

————————————–

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.

Horizon: What’s new about that? A TV commercial is also, in essence, a filter between consumers and companies.

RG: The difference is that digital technology has a much greater impact on the brand experience than traditional marketing ever could have had. Nowadays, the bulk of interactions with my bank are actually with an ATM or online banking. In the U.S., only four percent of all customers aged between 15 and 50 know any of their bank’s employees by name. And without a personal bank advisor, mainly what’s left to shape brand awareness is the bank’s technological interfaces.

Horizon: Aren’t you just adding new meaning to simple customer service features? Brand awareness has always been one of the core tasks of advertising.

RG: That’s not going far enough. Brand loyalty is largely built on the real experiences the consumer has with the brand. And there is often a huge gap between how the company sees itself and the real picture, given the digital options that are theoretically available. 80 percent of all CEOs believe that their brand provides a superior user experience. Yet only 8 percent of customers agree, on average.

Horizon: Is that proof that traditional advertising as we know it is officially on its deathbed?

RG: No, advertising will not die, but it does have to change. Brand building is just as important as it was before. But you can’t just shout out your messages any more. Brands have to become part of their users’ way of life or build loyalty by being useful.

Horizon: That sounds like a good idea. But how would it work in practice?

RG: As we have been saying for years, the important thing is to give the right message to the right people at the right time. A marketer can use digital touchpoints such as smartphones to provide consumers with customized messages right when they need them. For example, if my cell phone knows from my social community that my wife’s birthday is coming up, it could display coupons for flower shops nearby. That type of marketing works because it is useful.

Horizon: That type of marketing also reaches deep into the private lives of consumers.

RG: For it to work, consumers will need to see the benefits it offers. A personalized financial management service increases in value for the consumer with the more personal financial data they disclose. The more data that is available, the more relevant the recommendations will be. Marketing needs to succeed in showing that, then acceptance will grow.

Horizon: Currently, old and new media are waging a battle on which is more valuable for brand building. What advantages do old media still have, in your view?

RG: I think this is an increasingly irrelevant debate because the digital and physical touchpoints are getting progressively closer. For example, if a store window displays QR codes that refer to information online, is that a digital or a physical touchpoint? The real challenge today will be to develop a marketing platform that integrates analog-physical touchpoints and digital touchpoints. The digital formats will be the ones driving innovation though; there is a budget of 50 billion dollars available for digital advertising. And that is the goal that media marketers should be concentrating on. So it is “business as usual” for the advertising industry, just with different advertising media? Digitization will inevitably change the advertising industry. The future will be a lot less about mass media. Wide-reach media are no longer the only media with a communication value, they are just a part of the context needed in the digital world to really make a marketing message relevant. They are shifting from an anchor position to just being another link in the chain of the brand building process.

Horizon: What does that mean, in real terms, for those involved?

RG: The advertising environments of the mass media are increasingly becoming a bulk commodity and they will be treated that way as time goes on. Traditional media will be facing changes too. Newspapers will need to find new business models and television will have to develop into an addressable media.

Horizon: Marketers are confronted with new communication platforms every year. What else do we need to get ready for?

RG: We are currently in a phase in which marketing technology, the Mobile Web and cloud computing are becoming relevant to the mass media. 2015 will see the beginning of the Semantic Web, with the Internet of Things starting by 2020 at the latest. And the range of exciting new options is much wider than that. The video-game controller Windows Kinect presents completely new intuitive possibilities for users to move around in a story. This is already causing a revolution in the user’s gaming experience, so you can imagine the impact it could have on marketing.

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.

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:

SlideShare with full audio voice over:

Last but not least, big thanks to Martin Meyer-Gossner from TheStrategyWeb for such an amazing review.

So what do you think? Will contextual computing control personalized experiences and media? Will the government try to regulate the Internet of Things? Will Facebook have the guts to get into display ads?  Will Google finally get one right and build the right experience for seamless social mobility into the Android OS?

Creative directors are not the key to delivering amazing creative ideas. We hold them up in high regard for their creative brilliance and original thinking but they are not the white knight sent in to solve all our great challenges.

Winning and delivering great work comes from a culture of creative excellence. It’s a unified desire that spans your creative, strategy, account, production, and amazingly even your business development teams.

Creative types are rewarded within their agencies for their creative excellence. Account types are typically rewarded for the size of their business and the associated profit margins they keep. Business development people are typically rewarded based on the amount of revenue they generate of any kind. These differences highlight a fundamental flaw in aligning an industry (or an agency) to deliver excellence for it’s clients and elevate the overall quality of work.

If your business development people can’t communicate your passion for amazing creative work at the earliest meeting the opportunities will never arise. If your account and project management teams can’t constructively and positively challenge stumbling blocks from clients, partners, or even operational issues then your ideas will always be watered down. But most importantly if they’re not incentivized, trained, or inspired to think differently they will never want to develop the necessary skills to create a culture of creative excellence and fight to do great work.

I recognize it feels impossible to change the legacy of an industry sometimes but this is a revolution that each agency can work on individually and in the process give them something unique to separate themfrom the competition. There are infinite approaches but I’d consider looking at a mixed structure that makes each group take multiple factors into judge their own success. Each project/campaign/relationship that a person is involved could be graded with multiple factors including quality of work, results, profitability, and potentially an extra bonus category for anything that receive special accolades or press.

This drives each individual to think across multiple dimensions of their work and will help align them with their peers. Yes – it’s more complicated for accounting. Yes – business development will fight to only be paid on their sales results. Yes – it will cause a backlash with some of your staff. Backlash will only help you to identify who is more interested in their own agenda and who is dedicated to being part of a team to define their own success.

Less radical approaches could start with testing out a theory like this on an individual project as opposed to re-inventing your entire business approach. You might find it interesting to see who volunteers.

The path to greatness is typically not the one besot with the least amount of challenge.

Whether it is driving results, inspiring consumers, orbuilding icons we all have our reasons for being in our creative industry. For the lucky ones it will boil down to creating great work that you can be proud of (for any number of reasons). It’s this very reason that has always made me think passion was the number one quality to look for in any team member, as it’s the easiest thing to align people around to drive a common goal.

Each agency is different though and not all are driven by a common passion. It’s time to develop a new reward structure that drives people to a common goal of creating top quality work that produces results for the client and is still developed profitably.

How does your agency do it?

It’s amazing how brands love to use someone else’s big splash and ride it for their own … after the amazing success of the Old Spice campaign, many brands chose to follow the same spot archetype — which should have been somehow trademarked –. Sesame Street launched their Smell Like A Monster. With over 5 million views, this cute spot quickly went viral.

Love the fact that it ends with I’m on a horse, cow… mainly because I found this awesome Axe billboard today that makes fun of the same line.

There must be a cow joke here, but this blog is PG13.

Shot just south of Paris, France in Linas at l’Autodrome de Linas –Montlhéry, this 1.58 mile oval track, built in 1924, features banks as steep as 51 degrees, which is more than double the standard incline of most NASCAR ovals.

The stunts are just amazing, a must see for any racing fan, and pretty much all men.

The DC x Ken Block Gymkhana video franchise now consists of seven videos including Gymkhana Practice, Bonus Edit, TWO, 2.1; the educational anniversary video, Hot For Words, and now the two part Gymkhana THREE Project. A viral internet sensation, these videos have had more than 70 million views online and received numerous awards. Most recently the Gymkhana TWO video was named one of Ad Age’s “Top 10 Viral Ads of All Time”, a huge honor for DC and Ken; won a 2010 People’s Telly Silver Award, presented by YouTube; earned a Bronze Pencil at the One Show Entertainment Awards in the “Online Branded Entertainment” category, and was #4 on Ad Age’s list of top viral videos of 2009. For more information on the Gymkhana THREE Project including behind the scenes photos and info on Gym3: Part 1 and Gym3: Part 2 check out http://www.dcshoes.com/auto.

Ironically for a marketer that was “born digital” I have always had a thing for classic advertising. Prints ads from every era have lined the walls of our agencies especially if they were a current client. I have always particularly enjoyed classic ads launching “new” technologies, but today I want to take a moment to celebrate the best of the worst ads of the 50s. They’re offensive, degrading, absurd, and in many cases totally sexist. I’m thankful we’ve moved past this (for the most part) in today’s society, but we might as well be able to look back at them with a sense of humor now.

Which one do you like or hate the most?

Mad Men fans might as well take a peak!

Special thanks to Patti for the tip on this one…

In an increasingly global world, it’s not unreasonable to believe that some tactics used in developed markets will be successful in China. But it’s also important to recognize that new trends or even new uses of familiar tactics make every market different, a fact I was reminded of after moving to China three months ago.

For example, advanced analytics tools for monitoring the social media space will dramatically change the approach to social media and the value placed on it by marketers—once they arrive in emerging markets–just at they did recently in developed markets. The expansion of market leaders like CIC, a digital media research and consulting firm in Shanghai, will help drive this change.

China’s digital marketers can skip some of the mistakes made in other more established markets as they go through a huge digital growth spurt and probably develop new tools (and associated mistakes) on their own. I expect the same thing to happen with some tactics.

As a westerner living in Shanghai, I’ve certainly had to re-evaluate what I understood about China, including the way to approach digital marketing when taking on the world’s largest internet market. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far:

1. There is plenty of life beyond Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
And that’s a good thing, since these banned sites are non-players in the Chinese market. Although the social media space is fragmented, there are major players with hundreds of millions of users that rival even the biggest players.

Although a myriad of players exist in this complex social media space, start by learning about platforms like Kaixin (social network), Sina Weibo (micro-blogging), Youku (video sharing), and QQ (instant messenger). Re-learning the platforms can be challenging, but is possible for non-Chinese speakers by accessing them through Google Chrome with its automatic language translation function. The brand communications principals behind authenticity, transparency, and value in social media still apply, though.

2. Bulletin board sites (BBS) thrive in China.
BBS culture formed the foundation of the social web long before there were social networks in the rest of the world. They provide a rich and fertile digital ecosystem of like-minded people aligned around online communities, physical communities, common passions or needs, or even groups of friends or individuals. Arguably the largest social platform (in aggregate), they provide unique insight into the Chinese consumer and should be addressed in any comprehensive digital marketing campaign.

3. Forget leveraging a user’s social profile (for now).
One of the most (r)evolutionary digital enhancements outside of China in recent years was Facebook Connect (now OpenGraph) which allowed marketers to personalize digital experiences based on a user’s social profile. It allowed for new types of digital experiences that were exponentially more relevant to the consumer. This technology doesn’t exist in China yet, but keep your eye out for the first social network to release a platform like this one, as they’re sure to grow rapidly and become the darling of China’s digital marketing community. Of course they’ll still be up against the challenge of China’s internet community being wary of sharing their personal information.

4. Think mobile first for many digital users in China.
The number of people who accessed the internet on a mobile device doubled last year with the introduction of 3G services. Many of these individuals will have their first digital experiences at school, university, work, or an internet café, but their one consistent experience with the internet will be through their mobile device as opposed to a PC as they might not have the ability to own one.

5. Never underestimate the rate of change.
The rate of change is staggering and only reflective of a society that is undergoing a mind- boggling transformation into the kingdom of capitalist might while simultaneously holding firmly onto their traditional roots. China added 131 million internet users to its population between 2008 and 2009 and another 60 million by July of this year. This same staggering rate of change exists in the growth of the population and simultaneously the sophistication of the population. Expectations around the quality of digital marketing will rise more rapidly then expected.

6. Penetration may be low, but smart phones are big business in China.
Don’t base your thinking on any statistic you read as a percentage point. It’s very easy to forget scale in China. For example, China’s smart phone penetration is approaching 11%–a small number until you remember that it reflects around 180 million people. In tier one and tier two cities—the provincial capitals and main urban (and wealthy) centers—average penetration is even higher.

7. E-commerce plays a different role in China.
Mega players like Amazon and Ebay have never been able to take on domestic China offerings like Alibaba Group’s B2C e-commerce platform Taobao. China’s great rush of consumerism has driven desire for premium brands beyond the tier one cities, but consumers don’t have access to the retail outlets of top tier cities or are unable to afford their new aspirations. E-commerce players like Taobao are able to provide access to these goods across China and appear to be able to provide deep discounts not available at retail locations.

8. Don’t expect insights into people’s offline behaviors to reflect their behavior online.
In China, the internet provides an outlet for people to live an online identity that is quite different from their offline identity. Sometimes these online personas are a reaction to a repressed cultural environment due to religion, the government, or society-based traditions.

In other scenarios, it can be an opportunity to live out escapism and fulfill people’s dreams through a virtual world. Social networks in China boast games like “buying houses” and “parking lot” for example. Don’t rely on standard research and consumer insights to reach your audience as you might find unique opportunities by understanding a consumer’s online persona and how it’s connected back to their offline persona.

Digital marketing in China is at a very exciting stage in its development. It has huge scale and reach, the budgets are growing, marketers’ understanding is maturing, and most importantly creativity is emerging in new and exciting ways. Avoid some of the pitfalls and join the fray.

(as published in AdAgeChina.com)