Thursday, April 17, 2008
AdTech and A New Way To Listen
byI’ve been at Ad:Tech in San Francisco this week, which labels itself as The Event for Digital Marketing. However, as many of the speakers pointed out: “What isn’t digital in media these days or rapidly heading that way?” In light of that, Ad:Tech is really about what is happening in marketing—period.
As fast as the spending in digital marketing is growing, what amazed most people here — from both the client side and marketing industry side of the business — is why it isn’t even happening faster. Many presenters feel the recession or near-recession we are currently experiencing will actually accelerate the shift to digital media. Many companies, faced with a slowdown in sales, will need to find a way to sell more products or services with less resources. The general consensus is that this will push more companies to opt for the greater and immediate return on investment that webcentric marketing programs can deliver.
The greatest resistance to new media according to several of the speakers is old-line CMOs whose roots are firmly entrenched in a previous era of marketing. That is why CMO tenures are only about two years: there is a fundamental reordering going on in the marketing departments at many large companies as old thinking is replaced with new. This is the same point I made in a post here about ten days ago (CMO 2.0).
In this new media environment with increasing importance placed on social networks, it was interesting to use one of these new tools to monitor audience reaction to the presentations as they happened. A website called Tweet Scan, which is a search engine for Twitter posts, constantly monitored the Twitter traffic in the audience and fed it to my laptop. It was like reading people’s thoughts in the audience almost as they happened. This would be a distracting tool if you were a presenter!
