Apr 16
Today’s keynote speaker was George Kliavkoff, Chief Digital Officer at NBC. His presentation was actually an interview done by a senior writer at Fortune Magazine, Adam Lashinsky. The best part was probably Adam’s questioning — he really grilled the NBC exec on everything from hulu.com to his relationship with Steve Jobs. I didn’t realize that hulu had finally launched the full version of the site until I visited it today; it’s been up now for a couple of months supposedly. It actually looks really nice — quite applesque. I’m interested to see how well it does compared to distribution on itunes and how big it will be compared to Youtube (though they aren’t really competing for content; instead they will be competing for eyeballs).
The best part of the today’s sessions was definitely the “You don’t know jack!” session. ad tech invited about 6 or 7 teens (dubbed millenials or the millenial generation) from the bay area and asked them what devices or services that can’t live without, what they they thought of sms advertisements, freerice.com, virality, etc. The kids were pretty sharp so they were likely a bit ahead of the curve when compared to their contemporaries but it definitely gives you an idea of what direction they are heading.
One thing that I’ve really appreciated at ad tech is not only the quality of the speakers but the quality of the moderators and interviewers. They’ve seemed to have hired a bunch of senior journalists from big newspapers and the quality of their questions and statements is noticed. Even if the content in tomorrow’s session is weak, the conference has already paid for itself several times over. I would definitely recommend it to anyone in the marketing industry.
Apr 16
So the sun has set on the first day of ad tech and I promised a report on the day so here goes…
Jeff Hayslett, CMO of Kodak, was the keynote and did a great job though it was the first time I’ve heard someone drop the f-bomb in a presentation! One of the more interesting points of his presentation that I wasn’t aware of was that Kodak actually invented the digital camera but decided not to release because they were making so much money selling film. Obviously a big mistake. I actually caught up with him after spoke and he seemed like he’d be a cool guy to work with.
One of the sessions covered the future of marketing… it was interesting. The speakers covered everything from digital coupons text to you cell phone, to digital ads on GPS systems to LCD displays interactively showing off the features of products on display. The presentation that got the most ooo’s was Total Immersion’s 3D digital imaging. It worked by holding up the packaging of the product to a camera and then viewing a 3D image of the product on an LCD screen. Though it looked very cool, it doesn’t seem very useful or even that effective in presenting the product.
In an afternoon session, the topic of the future of search was covered. Representatives from Google, Microsoft, a couple of big advertisers and an online marketing agency made up the panel. The Google rep was the Directory of Advertising for the Western Region of the US and that was about as interesting as her presentation got. Surprisingly, the rep from MSN was actually pretty interesting and talked about some interesting stuff they will short be coming out with, including real time, real data on keyword searches. It sounded like something similar to the overture keyword tool which I dearly miss (since its no longer been updated, I’ve been relying on SEO Book’s keyword tool which is ok but I don’t always trust).
Unfortunately, the afternoon sessions were pretty boring so I spent most of my time catching up on my google reader feeds were pretty lean on material. I also had to leave early a couple of sessions to do a couple of conference calls so I didn’t catch everything.
Tomorrow and Thursday will be covering a lot more material (more tracks) so I anticipate coming back to the hotel with a lot more education, information and ideas.