On Wednesday, I attended the third and final day of ad:tech San Francisco, the West Coast edition of an international conference and expo that shares strategies and case studies on all matters relating to digital marketing. Although I only got to catch segments of the day's many conference events, I quickly caught onto the event's vibe, and its conveyance of digital marketing's current theme.
Several of the conference sessions focused on how traditional marketing could adapt and better use social media and mobile marketing, which also seemed the selling buzz of dozens of exhibits at the ad:tech expo. Some key ideas presented included techniques for better audience engagement -- from brandishing more close-knit twitter followers, as opposed to millions of anonymous fans, to examples of marketing by engaging the target in creative opportunities, such as design and slogan contests, which naturally generate viral marketing. Another topic of concern was how to keep up with all these fleeting media dissemination technologies. According to the ad:tech organizers, the speakers are selected by “their merit, insight, leadership and ability to share new research and metrics”.
Between conferences, I made my way through the Moscone Center's large exhibit hall to visit and get to know each of ad:tech expo's 265 exhibitors. Although the exhibits were classified by these relational categories -- "New and Emerging Technology," "Performance Marketing," "Search", "Ad Services", "Agency/Creative", "Web and Database Services", "Analytics, Metrics, Research", "Publishing", "Email", "eCommerce" -- it proved a navigational nightmare to try to find all of the exhibits in a particular subject, due to how these categories appeared randomly dispersed locationally. However, any walkthrough of these exhibits should provide a diverse overview of the kinds of businesses that stay afloat in this industry -- and, the range is wide, with anything from law firms specializing in Internet law (Internet Law Group, Eli L. Pearlman) to dedicated server companies (ThePlanet, Peer1), and from full-service consulting companies to your usual highly-specialized SEO, leads generation (alphabird, Clash Media, Underground Elephant) and analytics companies (CrowdScience, TrackSimple, Tynt). While ad:tech expo this year tried sectioning the theme-relevant startup companies based on cutting-edge technologies, I found that several other exhibits out there seemed to offer similar services to this select group in the Innovation Alley (RIA "interactive" video via a custom editor: VideoClix and Coincident.TV, and RSS-generated interactive video via Dynamic Video).
As expected, at such an expo, there were dozens of marketing analysis companies, each vouching for their own custom data analysis algorithms for text-based and text-transcribable data, but what I found most innovative was a working implementation of an image-based analysis interface for mobile devices. oMoby, created by a startup named IQ Engines, lets you instantly identify (and fetch information about) practically any object that you can take a picture of, even on your phone, from canned goods to everyday surfaces -- like a slab of plasticated wood.
While several companies showcased achievements in marketing and low-level decisions via crowdsourcing, XLNT ads via poptent successfully "crowdsourced talent" by using a contest-based system to engage independent filmmakers in creating videos for sponsoring companies. The results mean that the sponsor gets dozens or hundreds of submissions to choose from, for a bare fraction of the price of usual budgets for filming commercials, as seen in this "Tell the Snickers Story" contest by Mars.
With the current trend in computing being expansion "into the cloud", it seems natural that staffing and audience generation ("peopling") should follow the people equivalent -- crowdsourcing. However, I also saw at ad:tech expo, myriad traditional media companies that offer hand-picked teams, as well as volunteer-based organizations (Web Marketing Association's WebAward). While traditional media companies fear that they would fall behind the fast-paced developments in social media, the realm of digital marketing is huge with plenty of room for all approaches, and I expect to see multiple strategies in both traditional and new media continue to show successful case studies in upcoming ad:tech Conferences.
