Posts Tagged "advertising"

ad:tech San Francisco: Social Gaming – Today’s Fad or Tomorrow’s Killer Strategy?

Posted on May 2, 2011 in Conferences & Networking |

Session Description: Social Gaming represents half of all Facebook users and one of every two visits to Social Networks on average. Fad or vital to any marketer’s strategy going forward? You decide. To help, we’ll look at Social Gaming by the numbers in the US and around the world. An expert line-up of speakers will share insights about social gaming dynamics, success stories and best practices. A special focus on global market development from regions where mobile is the dominant platform will give a hint at the future of Social Gaming in the US. Check into this session to participate in the gamification of your marketing strategy.

This session took place Tuesday, April 12, 2011. The speakers:

• Mark Silva, Senior VP, Emerging Platforms Real Branding / Anthem Worldwide (Moderator)
• Jimmy Kim, Founder and CEO, NexoNova Studio
• Kim Kyaw, Senior Media Strategist, Toyota Motor Sales
• Tim Chang, Partner, Norwest Venture Partners

I was a bit disappointed about this session.  I expected more actionable items, or at least a US slant.  The panel took more of a “what’s happening in Asia” angle, so in truth, I ended up leaving a few minutes early.

Bullet Point Review!

• It’s got the reach of television and the engagement of games.
• Over half of Facebook users play social games.
• It’s bigger than the population of England.
• It’s bigger than the number of users of email.
• Zynga is by far the largest social gaming company.
• Playdom was acquired by Disney.
• Social gaming is a “Rich get Richer” phenomenon that grows aggressively.
• Zynga launched CityVille and got 100 million users in under 8 weeks.
• Social game advertising is not for amateurs.
• Advertising is less than 10% of revenues & social games monetize only 1-5% of users.
• Seek fit & utility, not just reach & demographics.
• Social gaming is more about getting together with friends than the game itself.
• There are various levels of commitment to advertising in games:
  • Branded virtual goods.
  • Branded game mechanics.
  • New branded game mechanics.
  • Multiple channel integrated campaign.
• When 7-11 did the tie-ins of their generic products with the Zynga games, they saw an incredible increase in business, repeat customers, frequency of current customers coming in, etc.
• There are many cultural factors for social gaming growth.
• In-game advertising hasn’t worked in the past because it wasn’t adding any value to users.
• When considering branding virtual goods, consider decorative vs. ability.
• Mobile is the new hope for social gaming.
• Fighting for distribution power, talent, and new revenue streams.
• CPE is cost per engagement.  Some companies can track this.  The user watches the ad, answers a question, and earns a new item from the game.
• “If content is king, then distribution power is god almighty” – @Timechange
• Cross promote games to other game users.

Performance Marketing Leadership Summit 2011 Recap

Posted on Apr 21, 2011 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

Once again, on the eve of ad:tech SF, OfferVault put on another afternoon Performance Marketing Leadership Summit.  Last year’s topic was compliance, whereas this year’s summit focused on growth, transparency, and improving CPA networks everywhere.  The 2011 summit was graciously sponsored by CPA Detective, LashBack, LinkTrust, EFFECTUS, & HasOffers.

While I didn’t explicitly learn much myself from this summit as it was definitely geared towards CPA networks, there was a lot of good information for those folks I’d like to share with you.  Here are some highlights of information I took from the afternoon’s speakers:

Darin Namken
Founder & President of Bulldog Media Group, Inc.

• Why Diversify?
  • Create value & enhance margins.
  • Stability & structural positioning.
  • Do you have the resources?
    • Management.
    • Technology (in house, other).
    • Cash Flow.
    • Infrastructure.
• You have to do something special in the market.
• You may need to diversify just to survive.
• Where to diversify?
  • Verticals/products.
    • Do you own your own products?
    • Do you have your own technology?
      • Internal development.
      • Partnership.
      • Strategic alliances.
      • Joint ventures.
• You’ve got to have a good database, not just emails but information about these people.  That’s where the real value is.
• You’ve got to be able to work well with others.
• Reciprocating traffic works well.
• Pay day loans have higher traffic, as do prepaid cards and rewards programs.
• You must have a stable strategy to survive.
• What direction to diversify?
  • Analyze, evaluate, and plan strategy.
• Future areas of diversification:
  • Major players of influence (Google, Facebook, Apple, Groupon, others).
  • What’s the next generation?
  • What are the trends?  (Chase them or plan for them).
• The economy has created more reasons to look farther into true performance.  Who’s checking out your backside?
• Who’s aiming for what current teens will be looking for?
• Spending marketing dollars doesn’t mean a lot of you don’t know what the ROI on that money is.

Panel 1: Diversification Strategies
Darin Namken (Bulldog Media Group, Inc.), Chad French (PeerFly), James Murphy (BurstDirect), Bob Regular (Kitara Media), & Curtis Fullmer (AdKnowledge)

• Is it enough to just be a network?
• There’s not much barrier of entry.
• The relationships are what set the networks apart from each other.
• It’s more about conversion & yield than the type of offers.  it starts with the offer but it can’t overcome traffic sources.
• It’ll be tough if you don’t have the right mix of affiliates and offers (e.g. Gaming affiliates but pet product offers).
• Understand where the publishers are getting their traffic from.
• Most networks don’t have a good handle of where the traffic is coming from.  Which leads to the bigger question – as long as you’re not dealing with risque sites, does it even matter?
• Go with what you know.  There’s no one path.  Go from there and then expand.
• What are you solving?  Are you solving anything?  If you want to grow, you need to ask “What are you solving?” or are you just opportunistic?  If you’re not solving something the relationship can’t last very long.  It’s all a supporting mechanism to fixing the problem.
• Remember that you don’t have to be all things to all people.  Build your identity and have a solid foundation to build it upon.
• Where is a bad idea to diversify into?  Chasing trends too heavily is dangerous, like with re-bills. Focusing on a trend too much means you’ll go down when the trends go down. Don’t act like an affiliate. Haves multiple eggs in multiple baskets. Facebook fan page marketing is tricky these days, hard incentives tricky,
• What traffic is ok? All traffic is fine. You want everything in between. All traffic has a value, but it needs to be transparent. Understand the transparency of where your offers are running. If you know that, then you can calibrate your offer to suit the traffic being driven. Take those factors into consideration & you’ll get better yield. Bad traffic isn’t necessarily fraud, just mismatched traffic to the offer. There’s a place for incentives, but it takes focus, time and understanding. What you ultimately have is a user with no intent & no interest in your end offer. If you don’t understand how to create the intent, stay far far away.
• What do you need for resources & focus to pull a true diversification off? Make sure your core competency is solid to support the side stuff.
• How do you measure if something is worth getting into? In our industry you don’t have to be 1st, there’s still a lot of room. How does it fit into your core strategy? Evaluate what’s the dollar value you could potentially build that business or division to? I there a growing market there? If the answer to any of those things is no, consider moving on. Don’t chase, identify if it’ll help what you do. If you can’t do it very well & be superior at it, run away. Know when to cut your losses. (i.e. affilicert, affiliate certification that OfferVault was attempting to do). Be mature as a company & don’t look at it as a monetary thing.
• How do you diversify the traffic flow to different kinds of offers in one network? Make sure to understand the performance metrics, it becomes an education thing, be transparent, educate the affiliates on the performance of other offers. Just ask if they have traffic for those kinds of offers. How many times can you tell your publishers to “trust me!”? If they had an answer, they’d probably not share it lol. Get them to believe in the offer & why it’ll work for them. Look at the whole marketing funnel. Don’t kill your credibility by pushing something you’re not sure will work. Educate them that it’s in their best interest as well for them to diversify because advertisers can back out on offers in the blink of an eye for various reasons.
• Should you be a network without an in-house media team? It helps. The easiest way to get knowledge on traffic and performance is it do it yourself.
• Do you consider who your ultimate client is? Advertiser or publisher? Does that come into play on how you diversify? Consider the end user, if they don’t want to participate in these offers, the advertisers wont have the money to write the checks. There needs to be a balance. If you work direct with the merchants, you can look at things as more of a partnership with affiliates.
• Do you have issues where an advertiser is asking for full transparency (double verify) and how do you work with that? You give it to them. if they demand a certain quality and you want to work with them, you have to give it to them & meet that quality or the alarm bells start ringing. The money flows downhill. The increase in transparency is coming to more verticals and more industries. It goes back to relationships, if you build these good relationships then transparency is second nature. Why hide? It’s a two way street.
• Do many publishers say they won’t run 3rd party ad tags & want to hard code everything? If they’re that resistant, you have to ask yourself if they’re worth the time to work with or career to.
• International a great way to diversify? Is it? It’s key to future growth, but you’ve got to be prepared for the challenges of fraud, compliance, policy issues. Canada & UK fairly easy to get into, but do it in a very stepped, focused way. Consider your offers if they appropriate for international traffic as is, are there any TOAs that prohibit the international traffic, etc. Do you have the resources for that kind of expansion.
• What industry trend or issue keeps you up at night? There’s a constant battle with shady publishers & compliance. Regulation from the government. How are government departments interpreting the regulations. The government of Google & Facebook & their control over the Internet & their policy changes. The inability to integrate technologies & lack of standards.

Ryan Pamplin
CEO, Ryactive

• Patented technology, open sources, propriety
• Apparently affiliate marketing is patented (Patent# US 6804660) filed in 2001, granted in 2004.  Probably without merit, companies getting sued.  Mid level networks (ShareASale, Blue Phoenix).
• Going to trial 4/17/2012.
• ShareASale has filed a counter suit against essociates trying to invalidate the patent.
• In house, proprietary tracking solution instead of licensing direct track or LinkTrust or another vendor.  All the networks mostly with propriety tech have much higher network revenue (i.e. Neverblue)  They all started with their own solutions.
• Benefits of in house platform:
  • Less reliance upon third party tech products.
  • Increased value for investors and shareholders.
  • Ability to quickly adapt to changes in the industry.
  • Data portability and security.
  • More control over your user experience.
  • Differentiates your network from the thousands of other networks all using identical software.
• Benefits of an outsourced platform:
  • Quick time to market with lower up front costs.
  • Software that continues to be developed and improved on their dime.
  • Predictable start-up and operating costs.
• Is Open Source the future?
  • Tracking202/Prosper202 is open source, and became the industry standard tracking software for affiliates.
  • WordPress is open sources and 13% of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress.
• Stop reinventing the wheel!
  • Every network is reinventing or licensing the wheel.
  • Instead, a group of networks could sponsor the creation of open source software.
  • A network is more than software, it’s about people, offers, and relationships.
  • Imagine if the resources going into development of the dozens of proprietary networks and the monthly fees for licensing were allocated to building a single universal platform.
• Noteworthy tech solutions:
  • If you can reduce the size  of your landing pages, offers and/or redirects you will make more money.
  • Cloud is virtually infinite scalability.
  • No need to overbuild gory intransigent with cloud.
  • Software required to automatically scale.
  • Pay just for what you use.
  • Increases your risk of downturn, not necessarily so with applications that don’t need scalability.
  • Dedicated, fine grain control over hardware.
  • Dedicated server is likely to be more reliable.
  • Model is proven and relied upon but 90% of Fortune 500 companies have it.
  • Wouldn’t put whole business on cloud.
  • ServerBeach (offshoot of rack space).
  • Backup your servers everyday.
  • Create scripts to automatically upload from your servers backups to your local FTP email you files, and/or another website.
  • Your data is the core of your business, and if you’re not already you need to take measures to ensure you keep it safe.
  • Auto backup with Tivoli.
• WordPress is free and open sources, with tens of thousands of templates available.  It’s secured and trusted by millions with extreme flexibility.  Websites can be developed in hours not weeks.
• Joomla powers 1 in 37 websites on the internet, not many of which are blogs.  It’s slightly more complicated to learn, but great for split testing with thousands of themes available.
• Drupal powers millions of sites, including MTV, Lifetime Television, Yahoo, and more higher volume sites.  It’s considered the best framework but is most complicated to learn of the open source CMS out there.
• Braintree is a great eCommerce solution that powers sites like LivingSocial, Bright Cove, 37 Signals, Open Table, and more.  It’s easy to integrate.
• Visual website optimizer is $49 per month but worth it; it’s like Google Website Optimizer on steroids.
• Be sure to include trust symbols on your website – 100% satisfaction guaranteed logo, privacy seal, SSL certificate, Verisign, McAfee, etc.  Avoid less trustworthy things, like GoDaddy right now.

Panel 2: Technology Insights
Ryan Pamplin (Ryactive), Matt Frary (SmarterChaos.com). Lucas Brown (HasOffers), Beto Paredes (Offered Launch Media, LLC), & Jay Moore (BigDeal.com)

• HasOffers goal is more people in the industry.  They’re doing a lot to increase data redundancy.
• If you can build something better than anyone else, go for it, but if not, don’t bother.  It’s not about if you do it in house or outsource it, it’s do I have go do it in house?
• How can you innovate on a closed platform if you can’t integrate a new technology?  Open API is the suggested way.
• HasOffers rather on the spot.
• Innovation is driven by need.
• Cookies vs. Server side calls? You’ve got to make sure you don’t violate Apples rules. Cookies are becoming outdated.  It’s inevitable that cookies will be going away.  There’s also an element of educating people on the new tracking methods.
• Larger networks are also looking at the tracking solutions with the working group.
• The banks are guilty of screwing the whole merchant services thing up.  A lot are just white label stuff.
• By removing inefficiencies, within the existing infrastructures, you’re going go make more money.
• You may find more of the advertisers having moe control on their programs mandated by the networks.
• Make sure your advertisers know how to do things, like tracking a sub ID.  What’s lacking is a true integration.  The education for the advertisers on the technology that’s available is also lacking.
• It’s not about the technology sometimes, it’s about the willingness to apply it.
• Its not unreasonable to want to know who you’re doing business with.  The way things are with affiliates being in the dark is not going go persist.  People are going to be changing the way things are done in favor of transparency.
• All industry panels lead to transparency.  We all talk about it, but who does it?  Advertisers do it, and unfortunately they’re going around the networks and collapsing the value chain.  They’re the ones on the hook with the government.
• If the networks used their tech for good, instead of just protecting their own interests, then there’s more money for everyone.
• It’s the business ethics behind the technology that’s going go drive the industry.
• Any tech you’re excited about or think it’s a game changer? Blue Cava (allows you to ID a user all over the net without cookies or server side tracking, browser fingerprinting with ip).  Any tech tracking people across devices or without cookies, across platforms, etc. Excited about online to offline to online tracking like pay per call.  Anything that’s going go move towards a more sustainable affiliate marketing industry.
• Privacy is dead, if you’re putting all your info out there on Facebook & whatnot, FTC requires everyone offer a way to opt out.  Overall it’s going to improve the consumer experience.  Theres a lot of opportunities to give people a chance to opt in.  The more important privacy issues surrounding ID theft are being addressed.
• Full transparency isn’t necessarily the way, but we want to know who the affiliate is generally speaking & have a way to contact them.

Performance Marketing Leadership Summit

Posted on May 7, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking | 1 comment

On April 19th, the day before ad:tech SF 2010, OfferVault presented their Performance Marketing Leadership Summit, a half-day event featuring discussions on compliance, fraud, and transparency. This was one in a series of events presented by OfferVault focusing on improving the performance marketing industry. Big thanks to Jim Lilig and the folks at OfferValut for putting this event on for free, allowing anyone interested in joining the discussion to attend.  This event was also co-sponsored by AffCon, OfferMobi, and DirectTrack.

I headed over to the city to go, and I’m glad I did. The afternoon was divided between two singular speakers and two panel discussions, end capped by lunch to start, drinks to end, and a break in the middle. Here are some highlights of information I took from the day’s thought leaders:

E.J Hilbert
President of Online Intelligence, Epic Advertising

• Compliance is a dirty word, some people think it always equals loss.  Truth is, there is no true definition.
• Compliant traffic is actually a 15% increase in profit in the long run.
• Margins decrease initially because of the bad traffic.
• Whether or not we see what we do as spam, the rest of the world does – it’s due to a lack of understanding.
• Remember, to the general public, we’re guilty by association.
• Compliance seems to be a catch-all, referring to legal, network, advertiser, corporate, affiliates, etc.  Perhaps it should just be legal and corporate and we can call everything else fraud.
• More traffic = more money.
• The most profitable cybercrime is spam.
• We can’t because they don’t – there’s not enough enforcement in the industry.  We need to crack down.
• Many top media outlets are developing their own advertising platforms they can trust instead of utilizing the existing platforms we use.
• Partner with the advertisers, that’s where the money is, not with super affiliate A or B.
• There are 4 ways to deal with fraud: accept it, insure against it, mitigate against it, not accept it at all.  We should not accept it at all.
• Top advertisers are the ones calling the shots, because they have the money.
• Watchdog groups are paying attention.  If we don’t do something soon, others will.  We don’t want that.
• Online advertising is mainstream.
• Sometimes the way we have to go isn’t the popular way, but it’s the right way.

Panel 1: What We Need To Do to Combat Fraud
Jason Spievak (RingRevenue), Brandon McDonald (Product2Web), Chris Graham (Atrinsic), Tom Cohn (Venable), & Carrie Birkner (Lashback)

• How often does a company do something when one of these outside agencies tells them about a problem?  Fairly often, actually.  They gets lots of flack from publishers if they don’t take action.
• A lot of the responsibility in combating fraud comes from the technologies, the networks.
• Many networks and managers are now taking the stance that if an affiliate isn’t going to be forthright about their methods, they’re out.
• In the industry, we don’t trust each other.
• Product2Web stops fraud at the cart level.  Networks should force their advertisers to utilize this kind of tool.
• Longevity planning should be the new term for compliance.
• Most affiliates live in this world of cloak & dagger, so where’s the incentive to be transparent?  They incentive should be in taking the high road.
• Part of a network or merchants positioning & branding should be that they watch things & enforce their guidelines.
• Affiliates are black hat or gray hat because it works.  They’re looking at the short term money makers, not long term business planning.

Peter Borders
Founder & CEO, MediaTrust

• We have the chance to seize a tremendous long-term opportunity.
• Affiliate marketing harnesses the best of the best, and we continue to harness new channels.
• Direct response television (infomercial) industry is trying to get into affiliate marketing.
• Evolution from Mass Media to Me Media.  The consumer used to be at the bottom of the funnel, and now they’re at the top.
• Consumer is king, and we need to empower them.  The market should be driven by quality and lifetime value.
• Right now there is little innovation, minimal brand presence, and an “all for me, more for me” mentality.  We need to evolve.
• What do we need to do?  Share information and data, innovate, move up-market, and collaborate.
• We have to think holistically for the sake of the industry.
• We should help each other to set standards.
• We have to be an industry of problem solvers.
• If the whole industry goes up-market, we ALL win.
• It’s time to build collaboration and trust, and support agents of change.

Panel 2: The Road to Tier 1 Advertisers
Rebecca Madigan (Performance Marketing Association), Todd Crawford (Impact Radius), Theresa Farmer (UnsubCentral), Peter Klein (MediaWhiz), & Liz Wasserman (Mate 1)

• Big advertising agencies still don’t understand affiliate marketing.
• What do we need to do for tier 1?  Educate – be transparent.
• Big brands, this should be sales.  Agencies can’t guarantee the spend of budget in terms of performance marketing.
• It’s a much longer sales cycle with large agencies.
• People want stability and consistency, which is tricky with performance marketing.
• Is it possible, technologically’?  There’s efficiencies when you automate that always allow you to make more money.
• Big brands don’t understand that with “performance” you’re getting branding for free.
• Brand reputation is a concern for big brands, so performance seems scary.  But it goes both ways, you can also build a brand using performance marketing like Mate 1 did.
• We need to do a better job explaining the metrics to agencies.  They need to understand that there’s two types of advertising – performance and branding.  And often there is some overlap.
• There’s a kind of lethal nihilism.  Outside impressions of the industry is that we’re “a little shady & quasi criminal” and people don’t want to get involved (great quote by Liz there!)
• This gets perpetuated by smaller, CPA type folks that are looking for short term gains and give the rest of us a bad rap.
• Self-regulating isn’t going to work because there’s always a few folks willing to break the rules for a quick buck.
• Advertisers worry about negative brand impact and are worried about consumer respect.
• We don’t bring the consumer into the equation enough.
• Merchants need to focus on moving up-stream.
• It should be a goal to really be able to understand the lifetime value of a customer.

Advertiser-Sponsored Online Game Tournaments on PCHGames.com

Posted on Apr 19, 2010 in Conferences & Networking, Contests, Marketing |

While this is nothing new (ad-sponsored games), this tournament is an exciting twist on the old idea.

Publishers Clearing House (PCH) today announced at Ad-Tech San Francisco the introduction of advertiser-sponsored tournaments for free online games on PCHGames.com. Sponsorship exposes a brand to more than eight million targeted loyal PCH site visitors and drives an estimated 200,000 potential customers per tournament to an advertiser’s Web site. Tournament games include Mahjongg and Solitaire, which are two of the most popular games online and on PCHGames.com. In February 2010 PCHGames.com had 16 million game plays, 1.6 million unique visitors, 5 million visits and 28.8 million page views. Tournaments are developed in conjunction with casual game developer Arkadium.

The next tournament, Mom-Jongg, a Mother’s Day inspired version of the popular Mah-Jongg classic tile game, is taking place on April 28th and includes cash prizes of $1,000, $500 and $250. In addition, the top 25 scorers will earn 1,000 tokens, which can be used to win prizes including Amazon and Walmart gift cards or entries into PCH sweepstakes.

“PCHGames.com site visitors are highly motivated and engaged, especially when they have a chance to win cash just for logging on and playing their favorite games,” said Josh Glantz, vice president and general manager of PCH Online. “During the last tournament there were more than 540,000 games played in 24 hours. As the popularity of these tournaments increases the number of free online game plays continues to rise and ultimately makes this a very successful program for sponsoring advertisers.”

The advertiser-sponsored tournaments present a number of opportunities for brand messages and offers to be communicated throughout PCH’s stable portfolio of online properties, as well as through the company’s opt-in database of email subscribers. In addition to the customized tournament landing page sponsors also receive takeover ads, featured placement on the homepage of PCHGames.com, banner ads throughout the network, pre-roll and post-roll ads before the game begins and when it ends, custom tournament and partner emails and much more.

“Our online game tournaments provide a great way for advertisers to reach a targeted audience with multiple touch points at a time when they are engaged and hoping to win big,” said Michael Zane, director of online marketing at Publishers Clearing House. “Our team at PCHGames.com works closely with participating advertisers to obtain artwork and messaging, and then manages the tournament in its entirety. It’s a simple process that results in an entertaining and rewarding experience for those who play, as well as a great marketing success story for participating brands.”

ASE09 Session: Advertising on Facebook

Posted on Aug 14, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

Session Description: Learn about advertising on Facebook and how affiliates can reach over 100 million members. Join us for a panel discussion including a Facebook representative covering all you need to know. The panel consisted of:

• Dennis Yu, CEO, BlitzLocal, LLC (Twitter @dennisyu) (Moderator)
• Zac Johnson, President / CEO, MoneyReign Inc. (Twitter @moneyreign)
• Jeremy Schoemaker, President, ShoeMoney (Twitter @shoemoney)
• Alex Schultz, Manager, Facebook (Twitter @alexschultz)

Unfortunately a lot of this session went over my head.  This session was really geared more for people who have already played around with advertising on Facebook.  I was hoping for more of a how-to, but I guess the session that I missed at Affiliate Summit West in January was where they did the intro, and this was a follow up.  I did get some notes, so I’ll go ahead and share them in hopes they might help you!

Bullet Point Review!

• It’s been a big challenge scaling up to 20 million users.
• A few months ago it seemed like they were changing policies every week, so they have tried to cut back on changing policies
• They are now focusing on helping the advertisers.
• The targeting is incredibly specific, and they can now target by birthday.
• They’ve set up the email affiliate@facebook.com – 24 turn around time for answers if you have a problem with denials.
• Advertisers need to understand that keywords in their system don’t mean the same as in Google so there’s a bit of a learning curve.
• Remember to make ad copy brief to draw the eye to it.
• Try changing the background color of the ad to get attention.
• A lot of people don’t use the Facebook reporting, but it’s useful to see who’s actually clicking on similar ads and target them even deeper.
• Direct linking is okay, but test to see which works best for your offer.
• There has been a lot of complaints about inconsistencies in the approval process, but if you upload 99 ads and 1 gets declined, it’s a mistake not inconsistencies.  Email them and they can easily correct the mistake.
• If you play on the boarder of ethics, you’ll have a difficult time getting approved.
• Fan pages work well for organic rankings.  They work like a newsletter.
• If you use a vanity URL that’s a trademark, it will be taken down because it violates trademark laws.

Some of this did actually help me, so I hope it helps you!  Alex from Facebook had a TON of information to share, and I was a bit surprised that Zac Johnson and Jeremy Schoemaker were so quiet as they’re usually pretty outspoken, but it was still a lot of good information for affiliates who are already advertising on Facebook.

ad:tech San Francisco: Master Class Workshop: Kick-Ass Creative—Left Coast Style

Posted on May 6, 2009 in Conferences & Networking, Marketing |

Session Description: Leading Left Coast creative directors showcase a cross section of innovative digital and integrated work for multiple clients including the strategy behind each campaign and the related pieces that supported the work. Learn from these master class creative directors about how to inspire and harness the big idea in an increasingly digital world dominated by fragmenting media and attention spans. What customer insights and trends spark new ideas and how do leading creative directors factor in evolving trends such as on-demand media and user-generated content when developing campaigns? This is the place to be to see the latest examples of strategic and tactical creative thinking and execution.

This session took place Wednesday, April 22, 2009. The speakers:

• Conor Brady, Chief Creative Officer, Organic (Moderator)
• Niels Aillaud, Senior Manager Digital Marketing, LG Electronics
• Scott Briskman, VP, Executive Creative Director, Agency.com San Francisco
• Jared Cluff, VP, User Acquisition, Ask.com
• John Rabasa, Executive VP, Managing Director, Publicis Modem West

Unfortunately this sessions was really a long brag session from LG and Ask.com.  While the television media they showed was funny and entertaining, I expected this “master class workshop” to actually teach me a few things.  Maybe some tips on creating engaging creative?  Nope.  So I was pretty let down and I only have a few notes for you.

Bullet Point Review!  LG  Electronics:

• Markets may be conversations, but make sure you are invited.
• Social media is about two things: context and people.
• Participation is good but creative participation is better.
• A good campaign is organic and will want to keep going.
• If your brand is befriended (e.g. on Facebook or Twitter), be a friend back.

Ask.com:

• Positioned Ask.com as an answer engine.
• Video ads delivered an 80% reduction in CPC.
• Crawls were 4 times better – higher traffic than traditional 15 second spots.
• They were surprised by the top performing question they asked – Who is Kim Kardashian?
• The agency is not bringing ideas that are exciting to them just because they’re exciting – they’re bringing them because they make sense for their business.