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Keynote: “Bringing Sexy Back to Display”

Neal Mohan, VP of Display Product Management for Google

• Challenges to display: macroeconomics, banner blindness, only 6% of display is rich media.
• But display is near a tipping point.
• Americans spend about as much time online as any other media
• Four broad themes to revolution in display:
  • (1) Fragmentation is now an opportunity because of targeting across networks
  • (2) Creativity at scale
  • (3) Measurement has advanced beyond CTR, to brand lift, effectiveness, conversion, etc.
  • (4) Web is social, catching up with life.
• Transformative: multiple data sources in real-time at scale. Now you can reach the right audience at the right time, and control your costs and minimize waste.
• More transactions per day on DoubleClick than all equity and bond transactions in the world.
• For publishers, this also opens a whole world of revenue, since they can provide real-time data on their audience to marketers.
• What display has that TV doesn’t (from a creativity standpoint): Interactivity, knowledge about viewers. Example: Volvo XC60 display ad that allowed user to play with car systems, see tweets from NY Auto Show, etc. Very engaging, great metrics.
• Example: Allowing user to choose their own pre-roll raised unaided awareness 380%.
• Example (spec): Shoot Nike billboard with Google Goggles, get info on nearby stores, promotions, build your own shoe app.
• Moving beyond the bottom of the funnel:
  • (1) Measuring brand lift by web traffic (both to your site and related sites you don’t own) and brand searches (via branded search terms). Data now lets you distinguish display lift vs. other offline efforts.
  • (2) Measuring deep-level conversions. Example: 86% of conversions attributed to a campaign without ad clicks.
  • (3) Measuring reach beyond TV. CPG example: 2.6% incremental reach for a video ad on YouTube. 25% hadn’t seen it on TV.
  • (4) Measuring offline sales. Using geographical modeling to measure offline POS.
• Social web means continuous conversations about our brands. Thus, every display campaign must be social.

Panel: “Online Advertising — Rapid Recovery or Recession 2.0?”

• Matt Freeman, CEO, Mediabrand
• Erin Clift, SVP Global Sales Dev, AOL
• Chang Kim, Omnicom
• Neal Mohan, Google
• Jeetil Patel, Deutsche Bank
• Marita Scarfi, COO, Organic
• Patel: 2010 is a turnaround year. Display and search should be up 10-11% this year.
• Digital media is anything with an IP address.
• Kim: Omnicom’s 4 F’s of future advertising: Fluid (experience, enagement, etc), Fast, Focused, Forecastable (the toughest one)
• Mohan: We can get all the data in the world, but advertising is still a creative medium, and we need to establish that emotional connection. Scaling creativity requires customizing creative to the audience (or the individual).
• AOL is pulling back its ad systems and building them from scratch. AOL is also a content provider now. Divorcing Time Warner will probably help with that transition; no legacy revenue to silo and protect.
• Publisher complains that the vast, vast majority of ads available for his sites are static banners. How do we encourage advertisers to produce better creative? Mohan responds: the technology is there and available.

I’ll be liveblogging the OMMA Global conference today, with nuggets of Online Media, Marketing, & Advertising goodness.

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First up: Keynote by Mark Kvamme of Sequoia.

“Mobile Wars: Will the Mobile Web Be Open or Closed?”
Moderator: Laura Marriott (here at the SF Marriott)
Panel: Tom Bedecarre, CEO, AKQA
Mark Kvamme, Partner, Sequoia Capital
Alexandre Mars, CEO Phonevalley & Head of Mobile Publicis Groupe, Phonevalley & Publicis Groupe
James Min, Managing Partner, Montgomery and Company

• Stats on worldwide smartphone penetration: 45% Nokia, 19% RIM, 13% Apple, 6% HTC
• US: 43% RIM, 25% Apple, 16% MSFT, 7% Google, but almost 50% of mobile web access is via Apple iPhone
• Show of hands, how many used a physical coupon in the last year? About 20%.
• The market for location-based promotions is probably 5x that of physical coupons.
• It’s too early for Apple to run a victory lap. Android is open, and Java devs will build a lot of momentum behind Android.
• Kvamme: iPhone is a terrible telephone — it’s not all AT&T’s fault. RIM is a great PDA.
• James Min: Platform wars are over. You need a closed platform to develop. Apple’s proved it, b/c of fragmentation.
• James Min: But… in the BRIC countries, Nokia/Symbian phones are much cheaper. If Nokia wants to make headway in the US, they have one real asset — mapping.
• Google sees 50x more mobile searches from iPhone than any other device. That’s engagement.
• Mobile marketing hasn’t exploded because the targeting and attribution to get customer to POS isn’t there yet.

Pepsi Refreshes the Brand, with Andrew Katz from Pepsi and Aaron Shapiro from HUGE.

• Pepsi was the most-remembered brand from the Super Bowl this year, but they didn’t advertise!
• Utility-driven marketing: Some of the most effective marketing helps people achieve what the brand stands for.
• What is your brand’s higher value? How do you manifest it on the web? How do you make it viral, social, and CRM’ed?
• “I’m SVP of Refreshing the World.” Groan.
• Why doesn’t Pepsi do pop culture anymore? Pop culture doesn’t exist anymore. Pop culture is whatever you’re into.
• Pepsi Refresh Project: Declare the Refresh Movement, Spark a Conversation, Make a Difference.
• People submit ideas for projects for $20MM pool, voted by users, distributed. Being part of the content, instead of advertising. Partner with media, retail, and celebrities.
• Impressive impressions — it’s a business change, not just a branding campaign.

Marketing track session: New Creative Options for Marketing with Online Video as Web Becomes ‘Lean-Back’

• VuMe demoing interactivity within ads, including a pre-roll that interacts with the adjacent display ad
• GRPs vs. iGRP. GRP (TV) is based on panels. iGRP is based on impressions and engagement.
• Branded entertainment makes sense as an element of the mix. It doesn’t change anything.
• Attribution modeling = Tracking all the ads that a user is exposed to, against eventual user actions and outcomes.
• Is the web going to be long-form “lean back”? More so, but different audiences will want different forms.
• Online industry needs to overcome advertiser objections of online video.

Marketing track session: Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Have to be a Gamble

• Social Media team at MSFT is always-on. Not in campaign mode.
• Walmart.com — Q&A for products, builds an archival asset
• How do you measure the effectiveness? Time spent on an engagement; likelihood to share; how many of those shares convert. MSFT: Measures ROI (based on reach) vs equivalent $$$ display campaign.
• MSFT got 200M free impressions week of W7 launch
• Levi’s — Content management is the great challenge for always-on social media. Solution — UGC (but do you still need to moderate?)
• Marty Collins from MSFT: retailing and augmented reality will help consolidate profiles. Will Whole Foods and the Gap have to ID you with different profiles?
• How do retailers feel about customers shopping on Facebook? Levi’s Brand Marketing VP: You gotta fish where the fish are. Huge potential if you can figure out the purchase component of the FB experience.
• The big Skittles UGC FAIL: What was their business case anyway?
• MSFT: Social media blows away TV or outdoor on cost per impression.

Keynote: People are Expecting Everything, Everywhere, Downloaded, Uploaded, In their Hands, in an Instant – Are Marketers Keeping Pace? by Laura Lang, CEO of Razorfish/Digitas/Denuo Group

• Traditional advertising and mass marketing are dead.
• “How do I join the conversation?” You’re already in it, if you have a brand. 25% of the links associated with major brands are already UGC. Better question is “What do I do now?”
• Case study: Barbie becomes human. She has profiles on all the social nets. Two billion impressions.
• Linear purchase cycle is dead. Now it’s a “purchase web” or “customer journey,” a random walk to the same outcome — purchase. Marketers need to figure out how to get into that walk, to serve the right interaction in real time.
• Campaign flights are dead. People don’t decide to turn on when you’re advertising. You need to always on, which is hard.
• GM trying to get potential customers to change their consideration of GM at purchase. Digitas serving content based on user actions on car sites.
• Hands up: How many people have heard of Chat Roulette? What? Maybe 10%???
• Social ROI is not a sufficient measure. ROI is what you need.
• Social is not a channel. It’s how we live now.

My laptop battery is crying mercy, so I’ll shut down for the day. Going to continue to follow on Twitter via mobile. Cheers.

Last weekend, the wife and I strolled to the Verizon store in the Mission and picked up his-n-hers Motorola Droids, Verizon’s first smart phone with Google’s Android OS.

So far, they’ve been great. Web surfing and Gmail are delightfully fast, and call quality is excellent. (Most importantly, we haven’t resigned ourselves to the black hole that is the AT&T mobile network.) iPhone and BlackBerry owners have known this for years, but it’s a remarkable experience to walk around with a pocket-sized computer far more powerful than the tower case that sat under your desk just a few years ago.

As I was surfing the web this morning, I spotted this ad on the Knowledge@Wharton ad. And I was kind of blown away.

Within a standard 300 x 250 display unit (what we called an “L-REC” at Yahoo!) is a feed of punchy editorial links about the Droid. Scroll down, and you’ll see what looks like dozens if not hundreds of posts from news sites, magazines, and blogs. Topics include:

• Positive reviews of the Droid
• Upbeat news about the Droid launch
• Top apps for Android devices
• Downbeat news about the iPhone, including viruses and developer disaffection with the Apple App Store
• Information about the Droid Eris, HTC’s lighter version

All the links click to the original articles, with a toolbar to Tweet or see more.

The display ad hits on a number of strong points:

• It’s targeted
• It’s interactive
• It gives me a choice of compelling content to click
• It lives on beyond the click
• It encourages me to share
• It includes links to add this Droid feed to Facebook or Twitter

What could be better about it? A few things. If I weren’t already interested in the Droid, I wouldn’t be drawn to it, or bother to scroll. I also suspect this ad wouldn’t test well on a site where people weren’t coming to engage in the act of reading. I can also only see two headlines on the first screen, and the gray-on-black scrollbar could be more obvious.

But in general, it’s great to see such a compelling and innovative ad that so precisely built for an audience and an experience. More, please!

“The web is not TV.”

It sounds obvious enough, and yet how many video ads do you see online that appear to be shoveled directly from cable? The 15-second video spot has become the de facto standard.

Of course, this will change. In their formative years, television ads were basically radio ads with visible narrators. It wasn’t until viewers and marketers became comfortable with the new format that commercials became more like little movies.

Today, some brands with reputations for innovation are exploiting the interactive and creative possibilities of online advertising, especially video advertising. But those still seem to be the exceptions.

My friend Phil O’Neill, director of analytics for VideoEgg, had such a perspective in an essay he scribed for MarketingWeek UK, titled “The Golden Rules of Online Video Advert Design.” His golden rules boil down to three design principles.

1. The web is not the same as TV: Ads should be rich, interactive, and “push-pull.”
2. Clarity is key: If the UI is confusing, users won’t bother.
3. Creative content, creative delivery: If it’s not compelling, users won’t stick around and won’t remember it.

These seem obvious. So why, in these adolescent years of web video, are they so often ignored? Think about that next time you see (or place) a 15-second pre-roll.

Back when I worked on My Yahoo!, one of my projects was to create ad quality standards. Users were generally displeased with seeing an LREC (the standard “large rectangle” ad you see on so many sites) where they used to see their own content, so we had to be sensitive to what users were experiencing in that spot on the screen.

We certainly would not have approved this:

(Click on it to see its gory detail.)

This is the Old Spice campaign currently running on Yahoo! sports. The LREC (which is animated) shows what is supposed to be a very hairy armpit crusted with chunks of antiperspirant residue. (One of the chunks falls and crushes a car, for some reason.) This campaign fails for two very obvious reasons:

1. The LREC: This may say more about me than the ad, but when I saw the LREC, my first thought wasn’t “armpit.”
2. The “takeover” portion: Anyone who enjoys seeing their browser’s vertical borders covered in crusty armpit hair, raise your hands.

I have a pretty strong stomach, but I am repulsed. Is it just me? Or is this an ad standards FAIL?