know | Future

ad:tech this week was all a-fluttery with web 2.0. Paul Lenzi, Director of Interactive/Creative Services at Modernista! in Boston, was kind enough to send us his impressions from the conference:

Many of the thoughts expressed below were thematic to this year’s show. Naming all speakers, panelists and moderators that contributed to my interpretations would be excessive. I credit the show organizers and presenters for a very informed few days and offer apologies in advance for using a few direct quotes without citing source.

To state the obvious: The common thread to the ad:tech 2006 NYC conference sessions was web 2.0 and social networking–no surprise. (It would be fair to mention that the viral case study of the year is the Diet Coke and Mentos “science guys”. And the media darling is certainly YouTube’s purchase by Google.) The question around the topic of social networking is: “is it real or a fad”? Is this the tipping point or Bubble Part Deux?

The best definition of “viral” I’ve heard in a while has to be “bored at work network”. This is the new demographic target when attempting to create the next thing that will catch web-fire. But as an advertiser that has been around a bubble or two, the other tenet of the day rings familiar: It’s not the medium it’s the message–the idea comes first then the execution.

Things aren’t really that different than web 1.0 after all. We’ve gone from “We need a web site”, to: “We need a social network, community-based, viral video idea to sell our widgets”. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. We need to consider the audience and we need to respect how savvy they are to what’s legit or staged with the specific intent to go viral. We need to connect with the online consumer, measure the experience and use web sites as surrogates for sales.

Successful viral is still mostly about funny. A baseball bat to the groin will always be funny. But as soon as you try to sell the bat it becomes a funny ad. It’s instantly contextualized. Will the public care as much about the Mentos/Coke guys now that they are being paid by Coke? We’ll see. This is, perhaps, beside the point as long as it’s being seen. But what is the measure? If 40,000 people download an ad is that a success? 100,000? 1,000,000? What qualifies as a success online compared to how we measure an ad on television? Maybe the answer is the audience itself. On television you target a specific demographic, but a wide spectrum of people end up seeing the ad. Maybe the bored at work network is the new bullseye on the prime time audience target.

Where are the media dollars being spent? Clearly, more is going into online. Budgets once reserved for television are finding their way to the online space. Case in point: Pontiac launched the G5 as an online campaign only. This is a trend worth watching as the new measures for success gets defined over time.

Some predictions at ad:tech about the “Anywhere Consumer” put the focus once again on the message first, then onto the challenge of delivering it. The important thing is that the message needs to take into account the new convenience culture. It’s not as simple as moving media spend from television to online when there are MP3 players, PDAs, myriad mobile devices and in environment media to consider. I’m not suggesting we create commercials for iPods–or maybe I am–many iPods play video so the vehicle is in place. But certainly there is an opportunity for messaging at the point of download or reinforced messaging within the content itself. The point is that today’s consumer is a highly mobile target–they’re not just sitting in front of the TV waiting for commercials to happen.

Big Cable and Telcos want us to subscribe to their infrastructure with all its “structured” limitations–think digital on-demand cable–on the surface it feels dynamic, but everything is managed end-to-end by the cable provider. There’s choice, but no dialogue other than tracking customer’s habits. Consumer-based technologies are the ones to watch for–technologies developed with the mobile consumer’s behaviors and preference for flexibility in mind. VOIP feels better to the consumer, despite having to pay for the service, because it still benefits from a “free” vibe due to its use over the internet. It is a great example of a tomorrow technology today.

The talk about the future of advertising was primarily centered on TV. The prediction is that in the future ads will be fewer and better and people will be more willing to watch–imagine, advertising Nirvana! Today nobody wants to watch the 8 minutes of commercials during a half-hour sitcom. Ad space in the future may be purchased the same for all mediums. Same price for TV, web, etc.? Hard to imagine, but the theory is that it will be in more places, more accurately targeted, thus more relevance in shorter bursts across “everywhere”.

A last note on social networking. The ad:tech pundits say to watch not for the next massive networks of millions of people, but instead watch as the trend comes back around to lots of smaller conversations. Hopefully some of these conversations will be about brands. Who really owns them anyway? The consumer. As advertisers we need to be willing to let go of some aspects of the brand more than we’re generally comfortable. If brand residue and blog bling are what advertisers are after, that can’t come from a 30 second TV spot alone. It comes from also letting the brand exist where it fits naturally, in unfiltered ways, in the hands of the consumer. Scary thought perhaps, but it’s out there anyway. Tapping into this and embracing, dare I say creating, the gestalt might be the dominant future of branding.