Panelist |   Jeannette Kocsis, SVP Digital Marketing, Harte-Hanks, Inc.
Panelist |   Ujjal Kohli, CEO, Rhythm  Media
Panelist |    Kyle Outlaw, UX lead, Razorfish
Panelist |    Ken Willner, CEO of Zumobi
Panelist |    Jamie Wells, Director, Global Trade Marketing, Microsoft  Mobile Advertising
Moderator |   Rob Gonda, Director of Digital Strategy & Innovation, Sapient

Topic was Mobile Web Vs. Mobile Applications; it was pretty interesting, Ken and Jamie as more vocal and Ujjal with some nice comments for debates. Jamie plugged Microsoft so much that it almost became a game, and I had to get back at him towards the end; he said he wanted to pick up a fight, crowd always loves that.

Please check it out, it’s long, but hopefully you’ll find it useful and entretaining.

Bob Garfield wrote a passionate article today about why he thinks Cannes is dead. Although I agree with Bob that many of the ads that have been celebrated at Cannes don’t represent the future of advertising, I don’t believe for one second that Cannes is dead.

The last year has been a rough year in advertising and this coming year is likely to be just as bad or worse, but I don’t feel this has left a gaping void in advertising. It only left a gaping void if you’re staring in the same direction you were last year and the years before that. We’ve all recognized that digital has been a catalyst for a massive change in the way we market, but our industry’s biggest challenge, after dealing with technological and cultural implications of our new wired world, has been learning how to deal with a world in a true global recession. It’s not just our budgets that have been reduced or shifted, but the consumer has fundamentally changed.

Like those that had lived through the great depression, the people that are experiencing this global recession are learning the value of frugality and economic maturity that comes with these experiences. It’s forcing us, as marketers, to evolve our message in conjunction with the way we’re delivering our message.

Broadcast, print and radio will continue to suffer as it becomes increasingly hard to be innovative in these mediums, especially when you compare each to the digital or any of the other emerging media channels. With that said, and in support of what I believe Bob is really looking for, watch the Titanium and Integrated short list. These lists will feature fully integrated campaigns and the most exciting marketing innovations where agencies demonstrate how they’ve evolved in this significantly different environment since the Lions in 2008.

I’ve always been firmly entrenched in the digital and emerging media world and believe that all major award shows are in a state of transition. From what I’ve seen, the Lions are more in touch with the digital world than all the other awards including the Clios, One Show or D&AD awards, which are miles behind on digital. Combine that with their international jury system that prevents any one country (like the US or UK) from swaying the vote and I believe you have a better chance of real global work pushing itself to the top.

Crispin certainly does get more then there fair share of attention at Cannes, but my hat is off to them, as they’re not only willing to explore any new medium as a form of advertising but in my opinion will also inspire others to try something new, bend the rules, and challenge conventional thinking. The shift I in work is happening already, although not quick enough in my opinion, and I’m just interested to see how Crispin will like sharing the spot light. Hopefully we’ll have another great winner like UNIQLO this year. My hopes are on Nitro’s “Best Job In The World” campaign.

Like any festival you have to get past the “creative masturbation,” after which you will find out that there is still some great work being done out there. Some festivals are going to survive this transition and I for one will be putting my money on the Lions. In the meantime I look forward to my time at Cannes this year. The main party might be a kegger on the beach or they may end up serving Natural Light and Cheese Doodles at the Calton. I’m not sure I care. The bottom line is that I’m still going to get to run into some of the best and brightest creative minds in the industry – and while I’m there, instead of discussing the industry’s doom, I’m going to talk about the things we can do to change the industry and discuss new and innovate ways to connect with consumers.

Maybe this recession is just the taste of reality we all needed.

And you thought my giant robot prediction was crazy....

Earlier this month I was able to visit CeBIT, the world’s largest technology show case, in Hannover, Germany. The exhibition space is absolutely enormous totally over 5,000,000 square feet. Imagine the biggest convention center building you’ve ever seen then imagine at least 20 buildings of that size and you’ll have an idea of how big CeBIT is.

I was able to meet some brilliant people from around the world, speak on a panel about social media, and be exposed to some great bleeding edge technology. All in all it was a great couple of days (even though I missed my flight on the way back).

Most buildings were focused on one subject that included green technologies, security, enterprise network technology, mobile, GPS, computers, gaming, or my personal favorite “the future parc”. The future parc was focused on innovative new technologies whether they had been productised or not. You could look at technologies at an early stage with the potential that you might see a new opportunity for it’s use.

I’ve highlighted some of my favorite items below that I saw during the conference. Some are really far out and some are fairly simple – I hope you enjoy the quick summary.

AIPTEK – This German company has produced a very small lightweight project that fits into the palm of your hand. It’s got no where near the kind of power you’d need to do a full blow presentation at good quality, but it would be great for projecting movies from an portable device like an iPod or iPhone onto the wall. Another nifty feature includes an oboard memory card so you can just store movies in the device and avoid the third party portable device all together. It’s still early days, but very cool none the less.

Global Emotion – This wasn’t actually a piece of technology, but it stood out to me for two reasons. One, I have full intentions of living in Asia this year and two I just thought it addressed a very interesting issue for westerners trying to do business in China. iWays is offering a course that allows you to learn to understand the body language and facial expressions of the Chinese people in comparision to some western body language that might cause you to mis-understand a business situation. I could see how this could be invaluable in today’s world.

GestureTek – These guys are doing some amazing interactive displays. They’re doing everything from massive table top displays that allow you to drag content around with your finger and close and expand additional content at will to touchless screens that react just based on the movement of your hands. It’s starting to feel really futuristic.

Another cool product they had on display was called “The Cube”. It was a self contained and portable system for doing projected interactive displays that react to gesture control. Imagine for example projecting a bunch of lilly pads onto the floor that when you moved near them with your feet bounced and rippled in reaction to your motion. This is definitely eye catching stuff. I still think they haven’t unleashed some top level creative talent onto it yet, so they’re still a lot of room to do some amazing things.

Fraunhofer Institute – The Fraunhofer Institute booth took the cake for me for most mind blowing innovations (with actual working prototypes). Some of the highlights included:

• Flat panel TVs that displayed near perfect 3D imagery without the need for 3D glasses.
• 3D digital dashboards for automobiles that also reacted and tracked your eye movement.
• Real-time facial expression analysis that could identify your gender and mood.
• A digital wardrobe where you could change the color and design on your clothes by just standing in front of  a special mirror.
• A bathroom designed to help manage the elderly (for example) in terms of making sure they’ve been doing their bathroom routine and taking the appropriate medications. It then reports back to any caregivers to alert them of abnormalities.
• An image search that allowed you to dynamically search for “simliar images”. The system was smart enough to identify properties like number of people in the image, consistent colors, a positioning of objects in the frame.

I’ve included some of the photos I did manage to take. I should probably also do a quick shout out to the people that invented the massage chair with matching audio and light stimulation. I couldn’t relax as well as I would have liked while testing their product because I kept thinking about how much I wanted to buy one…

Photos after the jump…

I was out with some friends having a drink tonight when the conversation sparked a memory of a big prediction I had a couple years back. Everyone thought it was a bit nuts, but in the interest of making it public record I’m going to share this prediction with you. Why do I need to make it public record? Well, according to my friends one or all of the following thing will happen if I’m right:

• They will immediately pay me $1,000,000
• Pigs will fly out of their asses and do some form of aerial acrobatic show.
• Hell will not only freeze over, but Satan will open some form of ice skating rink that also serves free heart shaped lollipops.es

Now that I’ve got that out of the way I’m going to share one of my most far out predictions for the future. Call me crazy, but I truly believe this will become reality in our lifetime.

Does anyone remember  BattleBots? It was a series of tournaments where remote controlled robots loaded with weapons and a healthy dose of armor kicked the snot out of each other in an arena. It reached it’s cultural peak in 2000 to 2002 when 5 tournaments were aired on Comedy Central.

The advancement of robotics over the coming ten years (and ongoing generations) will allow us to  build some fairly sophisticated robots. They’ll be bigger, faster, be able to handle bigger weapons and sustain more damage.

I predict that in ten years time robotic combat will become a more frequently viewed televised sport and in the coming decades will become a major spectator sport.

The reality is we love violence and competition. It’s evident in the sports we like from American football to Ultimate Fighting Championships. What boy wouldn’t love to watch four eight-foot robots rip each other to shreds with machine guns, flame throwers, and modified chain saws?

Apparently ESPN has just licensed them for another seasons that’s coming out in the spring of 2009. I’m interested to see how an updated version feels after 7 years off the air. Additionally it will be interesting to see how a sports network approaches it as opposed to a comedy channel.

Hopefully, you don’t mind my deviation from trend watching in marketing and simultaneously don’t think I’ve gone mad.

(I’ll have the last laugh though…. Oh you’ll see…. You’ll see…)

Due to it’s long standing success and the quality of the work it has become, without fail, the most respected advertising award show in the world and draws in the greatest minds in advertising and marketing. Say what you like about marketers we do actually have some brilliant wonderfully creative minds in our industry. I think really great creative types are less concerned with the medium they work in and are just focused on being able to unlock their mind and think in unconventional ways.

Humanitarian Lion is a group advocating a new addition to the Cannes Lions. They want all agencies that submit work to the Lions to also submit a single document of their thoughts on how to solve some of the worlds great humanitarian issues.

In a recession most of the world’s businesses and individuals will be donating less money to some of the great charitable organizations that have been operating for years or in many cases decades. It’s going to be a terrible travesty to watch the results of these funding reductions.

Sadly I totally understand the necessity to hold back much needed cash flow during these times, but why can’t we donate more of our brain power. I’d love to see something like this get pushed through.

If you’re in the agency world, check out the video below or visit their site to sign-up and support the cause. Only a few major agencies would have to stand behind this to really give it some momentum.

Next they announced AIR 1.5, which ships now with Flash 10 adding the new text engine, pixel blender, 3d capabilities to the desktop. They demo’d a New York Times app that dynamically renders text in multiple column layouts adapting to any screen resolution. AIR 1.5 also ships with the latest version on WebKit and squirrelfish, making all JavaScript executions at least 50% faster than the previous build.

Following, they showed a few demos of Flash 10 capabilities, which I’ve seen before, just as an audio mixer, 3d audio visualization, pixel blender effects on real time videos… Which preceded the announcement that MLB now uses Flash to stream all their games, completing a sports monopoly of the NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA, …
As part of how AIR is being used nowadays, Adobe invited Maria Shriver to talk about the California Museum applications. I found that a poor choice, mostly before most attendees are from out of town, don’t know Maria, and even the locals, don’t really seem to care.

Kevin Lynch mentioned that they are targeting 100MM AIR installs after just one year, thought they’re a little far, having now about 25MM.

An Adobe engineer demo’d Tour de Flex, a demo app with component browsing, code, examples, and over 200 API implementations with full source code… amazing piece of application, useful for every Flex developer for sure (http://flex.org/tour)

Nigel Pegg takes the stage and talks about Cocomo, which was introduced last year. Cocomo is social applications with Flex using Flex components and API hosted by Adobe hosted services. It pretty much allows you to build Adobe ConnectNow with Flex components, and it’s available today at Adobe Labs.
Kevin then announced Adobe Wave, a social notification service in your desktop… so the idea is that it hooks up to every social network and aggregates all notifications. Although I see the value as teen agers stopped using email and rely mainly in social networks messaging, I don’t see why Adobe had to build this… doesn’t really belong.

Main announcement of the night, Kevin shows and demo’d a full Flash Player 10 install on multiple phones such as Nokia, Samsung, the Android G1, and even the iPhone. Lynch was browsing full Flash sites, youtube, video, audio, and all from a mobile phone running a full unmodified flash site.

For full Adobe coverage check out http://adobe.com/go/keynote

The day started with a keynote from Jonathan Klein, President of CNN/US. John said that CNN embraces innovation, new technologies, new techniques, new trends, and urges all their employees to try new ideas. They have been using user generated content to get faster stories, they have a political blog aggregator that became the largest in the country, they have a program where an expert follows twitter feeds and answers questions and concerns online, in real time, they have a talk show where the host podcasts during commercials, linking the tv air experience with online / web experience. Another twitter fact is that CNN took 4 minutes to cover a recent earthquake in LA, whereas someone tweet it in 30 seconds. They also started providing more data for the next gen during the elections, especially seen during the debates; under the assumption that the younger gen can multitask and consume multiple feeds of information concurrently, they added the analysts’ opinions and scores during debates on side panels, as well as real time undecided voters conversions. Another link between air and web is John King’s touch screen; after the success of the John playing with the screen, they uploaded an interactive version to their site allowing anyone to play with it, just like on tv.

Overall, really interesting to see how traditional channels such as CNN is realizing and acknowledging the need to move towards digital channels, add social elements, and leverage user generated content.

Next, Geoff Ramsey, CEO for eMarketer, took over for 15 minutes to give us his seven strategies for surviving the downturn. In summary, the entire strategy is move media dollars from traditional to digital; it’s cheaper, more measurable, and provides better returns. 70% of marketers said they will cut budget for traditional ads, 30% said they already did … at the same time digital ad spend grew 17% in 2008, and it’s expected to continue to grow with double digits in 2009 … even if it only grows 9 or 10%, it’s better than negative numbers such as traditional media spend.

There were a few boring panels that I won’t mention, so I started talking to exhibitors and companies I found interesting. I will post more details later, but great new products by VeriSign, Akamai, Izea, and IdeaLaunch.

I tried to watch the TV 3.0 panel, but I really couldn’t stand it. What is up with the 3.0 buzzwords? Does anyone even know what 3.0 represents? I bet the panelists can’t even answer what would be the difference between TV 2.0 and 3.0 …. if we can even say 3.0 is here. For our readers, TV 2.0 includes P2PTV, HDTV, IPTV, Streaming Video, and mobile TV.

So what is TV 3.0?

“The first I heard of it (TV 3.0) was when I was invited to this panel”, responded Michael Steib, the director of TV Ads at Google (I appreciate his acknowledgement of the made-up buzz word). In TV 3.0 there is a proliferation of channels, people are watching TV in different places (online, DVR, etc) and at different times. Connecting advertisers and audiences as people start to watch TV in new and different times and places.

Here is the billion dollar question: will TV networks be able to make up the ad revenue lost from the shift away from traditional TV? People will watch 400 billion hours on their TV and watch 10 million hours of online video – online is still a small segment. For networks to stay afloat, they need to either increase the # of ads 4x versus what they are showing now, or increase the effectiveness. The solution? Technology: it can be used in 2 ways to help solve this problem. The first is better targeting, and the second is by using technologies to improve the effectiveness of the interaction or ad that is served (ie. rich media).

Stay tuned for Ad:Tech NY 2008 – Day 2.

Panel 1: Emerging trends of Mobile Technology (by Rob Gonda and experts TBD)

iPhone 2.0, Android, Flash Lite 3.0, Streaming Video, Electronic Wallets, … Mobile technology is growing rapidly and becoming an intrinsic part of consumer mentality. Hear the experts discuss the role of mobile in today’s lifestyle, discuss emerging technology, and predict national and international trends.

Panel 2: Rich Internet Applications Death Match (by Rob Gonda, Adobe, Microsoft)

Entertaining and informative event where evangelists from industry top players try to defend their products in a competitive death match. Flash, Silverlight, Ajax, AIR, Gears, Curl, WPF, many familiar names, but which one is the best solution for your particular needs? This intense event will reveal the answer.

Panel 3: YourOn.TV – How to Battle Mainstream Media (by Freddie Laker, Adobe, Justin.TV, LonelyGRL inventors)
Online entertainment is changing- online broadcasting tools are allowing everyday people to produce high quality content and distribute it with tools beyond YouTube like Adobe Media Player. Learn from the creators of famous internet content, the new internet celebrities, and the makers of the tools making it possible to compete against mainstream broadcasters. Leading internet celebrities will be available to answer a wide range of questions.

Sapient submitted a total of 14 sessions, creating for the first time a huge presence on this event. I also wrote the content of the RIA+SOA and the RIA Security panels.

Feedback, comments, and suggestions more than welcome. Hope to see you there.