Photo credit: CC Flickr user no3rdw

Thanks to Tom for condensing so much information into his short speaking slot, and for sticking around to answer questions afterwards. Thanks also to Wired Sussex, and to everyone who turned up – we hope you all found it useful.

A couple of attendees have asked for a copy of Tom’s presentation. Here’s a slideshare link:

Cheers.

IMAGE by Flickr user no3rdw

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Social Media and the Law event

• Integrate your marketing including aligning your goals, sharing data, paid and natural search synergy, consistent messaging and measurement
• Flexibility to change and adapt when necessary including real time marketing, contingency planning and response time
• Try one new thing including measurement, engagement, tools, brand recognition, and creating advocates

Here’s the presentation with accompanying notes for your own use.

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Staying Competitive in 2010

Still, let’s get going…

…Sir Guy Phillipson is wearing a tracksuit! And a bad one. So attired he runs us through what’s been happening on the webnet this year. Cleverly he uses a slide put together by OMD/the IPA’s Matt Simpson to say that online display advertising is ripe for growth. What the slide actually tells us is what my former colleagues at Circus Street and I have been banging on about for ages – virtually ALL internet ads are direct response (search, CPA banners, affiliates), despite the web’s best efforts (especially the IAB) to tease brand cash from advertisers.

Still, Sir Guy has set the tone for the day – brand ads SHOULD now come to the web it is constantly argued – and, by the end of it, even I am half-convinced.

And thus the first speaker emerges into the lights and it’s… Heston Blumenthal! So striking is the similarity between web guru Charlie Leadbeater and the obsessive scientific super-chef, it’s hard to imagine it’s anyone else. So what the hell does Heston Blumenthal know about the web we wonder? Well, it turns out, quite a bit. His greatest nugget in a polished and relaxed performance (aside from listening to the sound of the sea while you’re eating a prawn cocktail) is that, to understand how to approach the next ten years, the key is to think about not doing things ‘for’ people, and definitely not ‘to’ them, but doing it ‘with’ them. Everyone looks suitably poignant and claps the Michelin-starred web commentator off stage.

Hot on his heels is Jeff Levick, AOL’s VP of something to do with strategy. He has a great voice and cuts a fine figure of a man – he clearly runs a lot. But, unfortunately, he doesn’t do the perception that AOL is a bit confused any harm with his own argument for why brand ads should come online. Big advertisers don’t want to advertise against reality TV and 60% of all prime-time telly is now reality TV, he says. Much as I’d like to believe him, a questioner makes the unhelpful point that the X Factor is drawing huge audiences and whopping great ad support too.

Levick also has a neat slide about how content and advertising WILL now work because technologies and skills exist to package them up together for delivery, rather than arriving from different worlds as they have in the past. It’s nice but not very specific. But, he’s still got a great voice.

And so… what, Guy’s back? He’s got a suit on now and he’s about to run us through UKCOM, the very long-awaited online planning currency. Louise Ainsworth, the lovely boss of Nielsen Online in the UK – and I imagine now a much happier woman, given they won the pitch for UKCOM against fierce rival ComScore – gives it all some credibility by running through the details. It all sounds pretty good and advertisers will have at last a planning tool that makes sense alongside all the other ones (BARB, RAJAR, NRS, POSTAR). There is merit in the arguments – put by one audience member – that it doesn’t really make sense in online, particularly where we’re all moving to understanding and measuring ‘engagement’, rather than audience reach and frequency. But, ‘proper’ advertisers need and want it. And here it is. Cracking. It also helps along the theme that maybe 2010 will be the year that brand cash makes its way to the web.

TEA! COFFEE!

Post-break, IAB action man Kieron Matthews is on stage to give his annual review of creative work in the sector. There are always problems with this bit because, while one has to accept Kieron’s credentials for performing such a task (he’s ex BBH and marketing director of Dare after all) he tends to adopt ‘the training voice’. It is a voice this writer’s wife knows well and it winds her up no end. It has a level of instructive authority to it that gets people’s back up if they’re not actually in a training session – and Kieron does a lot of training.

Nonetheless, he makes a very excellent point: the standard of ‘creativity’ as we understand it (that is fancy web sites and ad campaigns) appears to have been low this year. He argues this is because we’re all focused on selling product (we’re back to the DR focus here) rather than understanding our customers. It’s an interesting one and I wonder if some thoughts I’ve explored before in a post on how digital planning doesn’t start with intense demographic segmentation (it’s more about their real journeys and language) isn’t related.

Anyway, good stuff and that tracksuit actually looks quite good.

So, next, how about a five-minute vision of our mobile futures from Telefonica/O2, presented by head of O2 Media Shaun Gregory? Actually, it wasn’t our futures on display but that of a pretty girl of unspecified age. It was a gigantic piece of marketing guff and did little except to force all the men in the audience to wonder if it was okay to fancy her.

Then, Dan Rosen, mobile dude at AKQA presents some work. Nike Photo ID is a bit old, one came from Japan (it was very cool mind) and the UN one is old too. This confirms suspicions that nothing has happened in mobile [advertising] in 2009, because everyone dropped cool stuff to do search even harder.

And so to the lowlight – the panels. The first is hosted by old media digital godfather Bill Murray and sees him giving a group of other old media digital chiefs (Indie, Mail Online, NYT, Bauer) the easiest grilling of their lives. ‘You’re all doing brilliantly because you’re trusted brands with a great relationship with your customers and proper content right?’. ‘Yes, yes we are.’ Thanks. Let’s move on then.

Let’s indeed. For Mark Lund, who I imagine we really should have heard of (it’s clear he’s ex-ad agency boss type) and is now chief exec of the [country's biggest advertiser] COI, is full of good lines, audience participation, energy, interesting subjects (how tackling climate change, obesity, binge-drinking, smoking and the like is really quite hard) and a commitment to digital, particularly social media. It’s all good and ends in a plea for the people in the room to help him do it all. We’re all virtually ready to walk out the conference with him and march to a better future. But we don’t, we go to lunch instead.

LUNCH!

And so we return to hear Richard Eyre, who really is a fine speech-maker, give his state of the nation address. Unfortunately, most of us are late, including your correspondent. So all I can really tell you is that he talked about how there should be more brand spend online than there is. Sorry.

Then he puts his considerable powers of introduction to Matt Brittin, UK MD of Google. It turns out most of the crowd – particularly the search dudes – have seen it all before (the bionic man slide is new apparently). But, he’s funny, confident and – notable plug for YouTube aside – not too salesy.

Next up is Ashley Highfield, former BBC new media czar and now top honcho at Microsoft UK. He loves TV, he gives a convincing argument for how the futuristic vision of the truly connected and video-enabled household is on its way and how MS has a claim to be in the middle of it all. At this stage, we’re starting to think that – given search spend has to peak somewhere and Twitter is emerging as a Google-killer – maybe Microsoft is looking good for a comeback.

We’re also starting to believe that if the internet TV/online TV thing really is now here, then (combined with the arrival of UKCOM) perhaps brand money really is coming our way next year, but probably the year after.

Then another panel. It was about behavioural targeting, NMA editor Justin Pearse used his alien hand to powerful effect and a bloke in the audience had a right go at the lot of them! In private conversation, Simon Rutherford of Toyota (an iCrossing client) makes an interesting point about how maybe behavioural hasn’t taken off because we’re all a little uncomfortable with the idea of it, which is quite heartening but threatens to put us seriously out of sync with the US.

COFFEE!

And that is it! All over. Oh no, apologies, some bloke called Stephen Fry sits down in a comfortable armchair opposite Richard Eyre and an entire audience is gripped with silent love and happiness. He chats idly and tangentially about smartphones, the computer on which TBL wrote the web, national journalists, Twitter, his own sensitivity to brutal web comment and probably more. We don’t care, we would have listened to him talk about socks if he’d wanted.

And lo! It really was over. Beer and canapés were consumed, working connections were reaffirmed, and the love felt for the web industry by those who work in the web industry was entirely apparent. No-one looked particularly fit, but they all looked happy. Good times.

More about the event can be found at IAB UK.

Images:

IABUK.net screen grab from Engage 2009 event

People shots – IAB Official Photography

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IAB Engage 2009

I was involved in the last session of the day “Advocacy and Philanthropy through New Media” and had the job of doing some scene setting around the social web.

The slides from the presentation are below, but you can also see the session recorded as a very good quality webcast on the Legatum Institute website. My bit is followed by fascinating talks from Invisible Children, Ushahidi and Global Giving.

All are interesting, but for open source and general geeky interest, the Ushahidi presentation from Juliana Rotich (49 minutes into the video) is a must watch. Ushahidi is an open source platform for aggregating text messages, Tweets, emails and blog posts and making sense of them during a crisis, such as a war or natural disaster. It’s also been used for election monitoring and I expect others will find more innovative uses of it soon.

You may also find the previous session on measurement interesting. It was fascinating to hear how NGOs and philanthropists were tackling issues around metrics – I’m sure there’s a lot here brands could learn from too. I noted that one key measure was Cost Per Life Impact for projects.

I’d also recommend watching an interesting perspective from the US State Department’s Jared Cohen [Watch the web cast]. Jared’s spent some time travelling in the Middle East and developing countries and writing about the use of what the State Department call “connection technologies” (new jargon, which makes a nice change from social media.

Many thanks to the Legatum Institute for having us along – it was a fascinating day and an inspiring glimpse into the workings of the philanthropy community.

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Next Generation Philanthropy Forum: Advocacy and Philanthropy through New Media

Nonetheless, the thing that struck me most – apart from the level of comfort with online marketing that advertisers are approaching – is that agencies continue to have a crucial role.

Agencies disintermediated?

Given this post sits on an agency’s own blog, you might accuse the writer of playing to the paymasters but, actually, I’m playing to the crowd, assuming there are some client advertisers in it (let’s hope they have good seats).

And my prevailing view has of late been towards the sense that agencies are losing their place in the world. When digital is so accessible and so fully plugged into advertisers’ (at least direct advertisers’) businesses – and with the commoditisation of ad space – it has become harder to make such a clear case for a [very expensive] middle man.

But, while the level of client marketer speaking at the keynote sessions at the event was extremely high and their insights valuable to the last man, it was the agencies that – for me – delivered the most in terms of how to see digital, how to think about it, and how – even – to dream about it.

Inspiration

Agency folk were given the graveyard spots in the schedule – most spoke in the last or penultimate session of the day. And – save where they had Google, mobile or social media in the session title – they were the least well attended.

But, they were all worth waiting for and, for those less interested in the practicalities of running websites and online campaigns, by far the most inspirational. For strategic insight, these it seemed to me were still the people you’d need to see.

For example, Norm Johnston of MindShare explained what to do with content: build it for everything and put it in the cloud. I-Level boss Andrew Walmsley showed us the levels of sophisticated modelling you’d have to approach to do justice to the value of online ad channels, including, (OMG!), banners. Andy Hobsbawm, co-founder of Agency.com, put technology in its place (‘technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories’) and, incidentally, was the only one to get the attention of Graham the AV guy – but then he’s doing the Pink concerts this week. And, last, Will McInnes talked about stuff I care about – not what social media can do to get you to the top of Google, but what it could do to help the people at the bottom of the pyramid.

In-house expertise, outside insight

What this all reaffirmed for me was not that agency people are more interesting or valuable than clients – not at all – but that, given clients have to be focused on the practicalities of digital for their businesses, agencies are crucial to deliver the much broader picture about where we’re taking it and where it’s taking us.

Were I to be handed a ‘proper’, client-side marketing job – and, based on the evident quality of the proper marketers on that stage last week (Mars, Disney, Virgin, Moneysupermarket, B&Q, etc.), there’s little chance of that – I’d probably still be thinking about taking the technical stuff in-house – site development, search marketing, Flash creative etc. But, I would want agencies to give me direction – how is digital shaping my audiences’ behaviour and how is their behaviour shaping digital? And what the hell does it all mean for me?

In short, as each of the keynote speakers from agencies suggested at Internet World this year, digital really does change everything. It’s them to whom I’d come for help on how I should be changing too.

Full rundown on the Keynote speakers at http://www.internetworld.co.uk/education/keynotes?ccs=116

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Agencies prove their worth at Internet World

You can see some of the debate that took place on the feed now: hashtag/ travsummit

Here’s my far from exhaustive run down of interesting insights:

User Experience is the new marketing
Marko Ahtisaari the CEO of Dopplr said some extremely pertinent stuff. If there’s one element of travel websites that needs working on to achieve increased conversion at the moment – it’s UX. (With quality, unique content a close 2nd?)

No frills airlines are on the way out
The mother of all low Cost Carriers SouthWest airlines is suddenly pursuing a strategy of selling itself as a ’services included’ carrier (Low fares… no hidden fees) to distinguish itself from its competitors!This is the most remarkable turn around in the airline industry ever! Will the low cost model be superceded as travellers tire of paying extra for just about everything? (God I hope so, but I doubt it)

It’s cool to be boring
UK and Ireland Lufthansa GM Marianne Sammann said that sometimes they are called ‘boring’ because Lufthansa just focuses on doing the basics as well as they can. (And they sure do that.) I wonder if boring is a good characteristic in the current climate? Forget funky stuff – focus on being dependable and trustworthy.

Holiday homes are ripe for a social space
US based holiday home rentals company HomeAway is growing – very fast. It’s adding 15- 20,000 new properties each month. According to CEO Brian Sharples they just intend to focus on the basics (see that same theme – focus on the simple stuff?). BUT there’s huge demand for people to exchange information and discuss online. Anyone fancy setting up a social space? Is there one already?

Facebook apps do work!
I don’t know the exact stats but it’s oft-quoted that of the many tens of thousands of apps on Facebook only a few have been downloaded by more than a handful of people. But get an app right and it can turbocharge your business. Trip Advisor’s restaurant reviews were paltry compared to their hotel reviews. Then they launched their Local Picks Facebook app. The app generated 10s of thousands of reviews in a matter months from people who wouldn’t usually visit the Trip Advisor site. It now provides more than 250,000 new pics of restaurants to the Trip Advisor site each month.

Just keep it simple!
This was another of Marko Ahtisaari’s mantras that I liked. As someone else on the panel for this session pointed out – the Online Travel Agencies growing fastest are those selling the simpler products (ie JUST hotels or JUST flights rather than the complete package). And that’s not surprising given how complex a product travel can be with all the bits and pieces associated with booking a holiday. But are people trying too hard to be all things to all people? Maybe we will see the emergence of smaller niche operators (or – more likely perhaps – niche brands created by bigger players) doing increasinglt good business by focussing on a specific audience and serving it really really well.

Here’s the official Travolution Summit Widget 

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Travolution Summit – the future of online travel

You can also catch David Hughes (Head of Performance Insigtht and Jonny Stewart (Head of Natural Search) at this year’s SES in London 17-20th February.

If you would like to arrange a chat with any of these guys at the event please email me and i’ll try my best to sort it. If you’re not able to catch them at the events we’ll be poping the presentations up on slide share anyway.

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Catch us at WARC and SES in February

…Guy says Barack Obama won the election by harnessing the power of the web to connect, inspire and enable the people. Who’s in control? Brands like him who understand not just that a shift has taken place, but how to use it…

… Matt Mason author of The Pirate’s Dilemma and consultant to put-out Hollywood media moguls on what to do about the internet, explains how mainstream radio worked out a way to co-exist with pirate radio stations. They used it as a source for new music, new DJs and new ideas. Put-out Hollywood media moguls should do the same…

… the thing about economics, you see, is it’s predicated on scarcity. Digital is all about abundance and that means everything has changed, including the nature of storytelling. In fact, we should no longer seek to tell stories, but curate them…

…unfortunately, Jerry Yang’s story is a very dull one. He wants to talk about how we’re all in ‘the attention game’ but doesn’t really and also forgets to tell us his ideas on how to play it. Given he thinks Yahoo is strong because it is still a great ‘starting point’ on the web (which we’ll always need), we’re not sure he has any. But we are pretty certain that $33 per share was a very good offer…

…Mark Charkin, global VP of sales for Bebo, has got the attention game all worked out. What you need to do is sponsor a promotion through Bebo that generates lots of videos of young presenters running around and shouting, preferably to a guitar-led pop soundtrack…

…Matt Locke, commissioning editor for Channel 4 education, genuinely does have the attention game worked out. He’s hired an agency (okay, it’s iCrossing) to really measure how his audiences engage with his online content. As a result he tells his people to devote only a third of their budget to any launch. The rest should be used to react and adapt to what users think, say and do – because now you can know. It is the single most useful piece of insight to emerge from the whole day (really)…

COFFEE!

…advertisers need TV and online because together they’re better, says Sarah Messer, head of research and insight at ITV. She knows this because it says so in this study that TV trade body Thinkbox and internet trade body the IAB commissioned. Oh, and, in online video, it’s pre-rolls that get remembered (or is that seen) the most…

…spirits slip as the major online media owners (AOL, Microsoft, and the Guardian) get together to tell us what they think. This includes an explanation of what behavioural targeting is. We are not impressed. At least Alex Marks from Microsoft is very funny. We like him lots…

…but, what’s this? A man from Orange who’s not wearing any shoes and is utterly let down by the venue’s inability to make videos work is actually a proper genius and really, really good presenter. We love him! Obama won because he focused on the journey, not the conversion (the vote). A search for Orange Broadband tells us everything we need to know about the digital challenge – and his in particular (O2 appears top of the paid and a site called Orange Problems appears fourth in the natural). Plus, Spot the Bull (http://www.spotthebull.co.uk/ ) Good Things Should Never End (http://unlimited.orange.co.uk/flash/go ) and Balloonacy (http://www.creativeshowcase.net/en/1/thismonth.mxs?pos=1&month=200806 ) are three of the best online campaigns you’re likely to see. Justin Billingsley, Orange UK brand director, is so good, that the IAB’s Kieron Matthews can’t resist saying he was the best of the day (though he really should have done). And he’s so good, we repeat here his final four recommendations:

1. Eavesdrop – you can now listen to what your customers are saying. Do so

2. Stop watching live TV- your customers either already have or are going to

3. Challenge your agencies – or hire Poke

4. Read The Feed – it’s his team’s blog and it has his presentation on it as well as all the stuff they like (it’s at http://thefeed.orange.co.uk/)…

LUNCH!

…Richard Eyre, media master and IAB chairman (among other things) really loves Cornwall. He shows us his holiday snaps to prove it. Fortunately, he does so in such a way as to remind us that he is one of the most gifted speech-makers in the sector and paint a picture of the digital market. Times are genuinely hard. No-one in digital knows what hard times are like. Still, the internet is an underlying current so powerful that it will continue to carry us forward. It’s just that some of us will get dashed upon the rocks by competing forces in the process. Oh well, there’s always search…

…Richard also reminds us that, aside from being a brilliant speech-maker, he gives the single best speaker intros of any conference host in history. The man fortunate enough to benefit from this today is…

…Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Frustratingly, Burnham insists on reminding us of our responsibilities. The room is full of people who know exactly what cookies are and why we need them and here’s this public service type telling us we need, wait for it, “informed consent”! Unfortunately, he’s probably right. On a lighter note, there are some jovial references to someone called Laura from the X-Factor that those of us who refuse to have the X-Factor on in their house fail to understand…

…the Secretary of State almost certainly doesn’t know what cookies are (if he did, he’d probably have a fit) but we forgive him because we remember he has rather a lot to be getting on with. Take the Olympics, the BBC, and arts funding for starters. His favourite TV ad is “the one with the Orang-utan playing the drums”…

… need coffee. But, instead it’s…

…the Kieron and Guy show! Kieron waves to the webcam and says ‘shit’ quite a lot. But they do, with the aid of the IAB’s very good Creative Showcase, show us some great campaigns (the continued inability of the venue to get video to work not withstanding). Their lessons are fivefold:

1. Help your audiences ‘live the product’ (like Nike and AKQA do)

2. Bring people together (like O2 and AIS did)

3. Give people personalised experiences (like Nike and AKQA did)

4. Use online to affect offline (like Foster’s and Play did)

5. Explore what technology can do for you (like STA Travel has with this video that – among other things – puts the STA Travel logo in the top right-hand corner when you post it to your Facebook profile…

…really need coffee but, no, it’s…

…another panel, this time to allow Frederico Grosso of Blinkx and Spencer Hyman of Last.fm to sell their businesses to advertisers. But we like their products – especially Last.fm – and press on undeterred…

COFFEE!

… panel. Mobile. It’s getting there…

…and, last, and probably least, it’s Ian Pearson, formerly futurologist at BT, now just futurologist. People who’ve seen him before say they have seen it all before. But some of us like how he suggests no business plan should be five years long. Even three years is a stretch. The problem is things change too fast and in unexpected directions. Then there’s how he says that “if you can’t succeed on the net now, you’re stupid” and “if your idea doesn’t work on the web now, your idea is crap”. He adds that robots and the like will mean the rise of feminine [interpersonal] skills, an idea with which I actually agree. We’re less impressed with skin interfaces and ad fields around our jackets but never mind because…

… WE’RE DONE! The curtains part to reveal an on-stage party venue, complete with expectant drinks hostesses and DJ! Some head forwards to see what the hell all that’s about. Most reverse themselves out the front door to that which they know and understand. Thanks IAB Engage 2008, roll on next year. You can see full details on the event at the IAB site.

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Engage 2008 – a digested attendance

Also worth a watch is our head of content and media, Antony Mayfield, presenting with Matt Locke from Channel 4 on our measuring engagement work for Channel 4 Education’s online game Bow Street Runner.

Brand Republic talked to a few industry experts about how they see social media and marketing working together…watch it here.  

iCrossing were pleased to support the conference as sponsors and look forward to next year!

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Missed IAB Engage 08? Catch it online…

Matt Locke, Commissioning  Editor at Channel 4 Education will take the stage with Antony Mayfield and Jason Ryan to talk about how we helped Channel 4 measure online audience engagement with recent projects. These inlcude their new online game Bow Street Runner and Disarming Britain, a series produced to raise public awareness of the increasing gun and knife crime in the UK.

We join a great line up of speakers from Yahoo, Orange, Bebo and Sky. Going on previous years (check out Antony and others speaking at last years IAB Engage), the IAB guys and girls do a top job at producing an conference that leaves you with lots to think about and a sneak preview in to the future. It’s free for advertisers so book now and we’ll see you there…

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Channel 4 and iCrossing speaking at IAB Engage 2008