ClickBooth knows how to pull of a spectacular evening.  Murray, Alex and I were invited by Eric Schechter and arrived at Pacha shortly after 9 pm.  We were tagged with special wristbands and whipped through the ‘VIP’ line up the stair to a special U-shaped seating area with our own private bar.  We overlooked the dance floor and entertainment.

The bar was filled with pitchers of mix and the Grey Goose bottles began showing up.  Our wristbands allowed us on all three floors of the nightclub and entertainers came on to the dance floor and stage.  Girls on stilts joined the dancers and overall the performers created an extremely entertaining variety of dancing, juggling and stunts.  We networked, caught up with friends and partied.  Yankees Fan Missy Ward ‘tweeted’ regularly from the Yankees game to keep us all updated on the score.  The entire nightclub celebrated right along with Missy and the Yankees as the big screen captured our attention.

The dance floor was packed when “Michael Jackson” came onstage.  His voice was great but his moves were magical.  We quickly realized he was actually a she - and she put on a great show.

When Slick Rick took the stage just after midnight, the crowd went crazy.  He was wearing a’diamond’ encrusted pendant the size of a dinner plate around his neck and a diamond ring that looked bigger than my hand.

After helping a nearly passed out drunk with his cellphone, (the battery fell out when he dropped it) I realized that’s not a good impression to leave at a VIP party put on by such a gracious company as Clickbooth, so I caught a cab.

I could have stayed all night meeting people and mingling but I knew I had a big day at ad:tech coming up.  Thanks, Eric and Clickbooth!

@HeatherinBC

Shelly Palmer’s Digital Boot Camp at ad:tech kicked butt. 

If you are serious about your career your online presence must reflect it, with no room for error.

Shelly’s first advice was, ‘google’ your name with quotations around the words - like this, “Heather Smith”.  DON"T google my name though because you will see Heather Smith, the Porn Star - lol!  If your name comes up with good results on the first page you’ve got a great web presence.  If it doesn’t Shelly has some tips to help you.

First, create an ‘Online Presence’ sheet as in the picture above.  Then get to work - consistency pays off!  Ask yourself what you look like, then create a positive online digital presence.

Shelly’s best tip, and something we all need to remember on a day to day basis:

“Don’t Be an Idiot Online!”

Be sure to match your online presence to your offline presence.  Look profession, act professional and BE professional.  Shelly Palmer is President at National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY and has learned to use humor the correct way during his Boot Camps.  He has created a professional online presence and everything he does reflects that.

You will be judged by your PDA, cell phone and laptop!
What cell phone do you carry?  Mine is an old ‘Razr’ - lol.  You carry one of those or a StarTac, you cannot make any excuse in the world - other than if you live in an area of the Great White North where there is no cell service.  Luckily for me I DO fall in that category so I showed Shelly my phone and told him I’m going to bring it to every seminar of his that I ever attend in the future - just as an example, because soon they will be extinct!  Invest in a good cell phone!  Did you know there are 4 billion cellphones worldwide? 
If you are at this age:  “49 and fucked” Shelly’s Boot Camp will guide you to midlife reinvention.  The ‘socio-techno divide’ is reality for many of us born long before 1989.  Think about the kids being born into this digital age - their lives will be incredibly different than ours.

You will be judged by your statistics.
How you appear on Google, your Alexa ranking and your Technorati tags are very telling!  Work on it.

You will be judged by your Digital Brand Presence.
Your primary email is an important reflection on you and your brand, together with your website, Facebook page, MySpace, IM/chat, Skype, Wiki and LinkedIn page. 

LinkedIn is the ONLY place you should post your resume - not on your blog.

Keep your blog content current, or get rid of it.  A great alternative is to build a 5 page website about YOU without dates so it always stays current.  Leaving an abandoned FaceBook page or blog will be a direct (and poor) reflection of you, basically implying you are “49 and Fucked” (Shelly’s term) when a prospective employer or client is searching the web for information about you.

@HeatherinBC

As Domino’s Pizza found out this spring, if you don’t mange the conversation actively it will manage you.  We’ve gone from word of mouth speed to word of click speed—news used to spread from one person to another, one at a time.  Now, it spreads geometrically on the web before you know it or can react.

The job of marketers is to have more people speaking positively and fewer people speaking negatively, the ultimate goal being to get endorsed and recommended.  According to a study by the London School of Economics, brands with the most recommendations in their category grow four times faster than the category average.  Increasing recommendation by 12% doubles sales growth.

It’s not just about buzz.  Buzz is just noise.  Consumer choice has exploded, and cutting through a highly fragmented media landscape is becoming harder and harder.  We want customers to live in high recommendation and conversation.  We need to be talked about positively. 

How do we do this?  It begins with a Point of View.  People are holding brands to a higher ideal.  Brands must share their values.  It helps to create a purposeful and immersive brand experience—an experience beyond expectation.  Broadcast still has a very important role to play.  A point of view recruits brand believers instead of a target. 

Rob Feakins and Mark Hider of Publicis started with lots of “show and tell” to illustrate the point.  Vicks’ major brand is Nyquil.  The typical ad in the category has some guy in a bathrobe with a red bulbous nose who takes medicine and goes to bed.  It’s all just focused on symptom relief.  A year ago Publicis and P&G started talking about what could Vicks stand for—not symptom relief but how can you be a better you.

They needed a contagious idea to start the conversation.  What’s a contagious idea?  How do you know you’ve got one?  It’s not just a stunt, not a “one off”, not simply viral.  It’s an idea that instigates, influences and ultimately changes brand conversation across all media and across all brand experiences.  The means of transmission is your consumer’s vast network of connections.  They showed us the commercials which were—how should I put it—lovely.  Really lovely and memorable. 

The old school way was to “create an idea”.  What does it communicate?  Do I agree or accept it?  In the new school we ask, will people want to share it?  Will they personalize it?

Here are a some of the other “show and tell” examples.

Speight’s Brewery in New Zealand lost its market position.  Publicis created a new campaign: Speight’s Great Beer Delivery.  Speight’s built a pub and shipped it from New Zealand to London by ship.  To do it, they needed a crew… 6% of the entire drinking population applied.  Speight’s is now the number one beer in New Zealand.

The next example was seen by 43 million people in the US.  The “Yes We Can” campaign for Obama was a phenomenal success and contributed to Obama’s victory.  According to the panelists, the video was watched more than 26 million times.

T-mobile’s “faves” campaign was based on the fundamental insight that most of us call the same 5 people 75% of time.  The campaign generated lots of buzz, including references by Oprah and Jon Stewart.  Talk about viral marketing.

Jacques Hagopian of P&G next talked about Charmin.  Charmin is a category you don’t think about till you need it.  It’s an iconic brand over 80 years old. Mr. Whipple was one of the first brand advocates.  He still has tremendous recall.  This was relevant in the time frame but something new had to be done.

Charmin came up with a contagious idea: the “red cross of restrooms”.  70% of times you choose to go to the bathroom, it’s outside your home.  Most people don’t even want to think about that.  Charmin first created a 57 foot truck, the Potty Palooza.  P&G took it to places where there is a terrible bathroom experience, like state fairs.  Then they took it one step further.  In 2006, they took Charmin to Times Square, the highest tourist traffic location in the US. 

The objective was to provide a welcoming home environment with—get this—clean bathrooms like home.  Jim Stengel, P&G’s CMO, presented this to a group of P&G alumni (including me) a few years ago, and it’s brilliant.  It has transformed the way we look at the brand.  They’ve been visited by over 1.5 million consumers.  The whole campaign got 2.5 billion media impressions, exposure in every major newspaper and on every major TV network.  The average visit is 45 minutes, and they get more daily visitors than the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.  This was accompanied by an iPhone app, “Sit or Squat”, in which participants rate public restrooms (sit is positive, squat is negative).  Charmin took over sponsorship of this and it’s become a new and innovative way to live the brand’s purpose.  The iPhone app provides mobile access, heavy user involvement, and has no seasonal or geographical limitations.  Consumers vote on quality of toilets and there have been amazing results:  8.5 million mobile web ad impressions, 350 million impressions, 400,000 app downloads since the Charmin sponsorship.

Finally the panelists presented TGI Friday’s Meet Woody campaign.  It is the intersection of social media and branding.  Woody started on Facebook with a viral video (http://www.facebook.com/fanwoody).  The challenge?  If Woody could get 500,000 Facebook fans, TGI Friday’s would give a free burger to each fan.  There were no ads for the first four days. By Monday when the TV campaign launched, Woody had 85,000 fans.  Four days later Woody had 500,000 fans.  The success was so overwhelming TGI Friday’s had to change the target to a million fans.  Woody won the bet and TGI Friday’s collected 600,000 email addresses.  60% of those who got a coupon redeemed it for a TGI Friday’s burger.

The bottom line is this: think outside the box, combine social marketing with other elements of the marketing mix, and you can score home runs.  If you think outside the box, it doesn’t matter if you’re big or small—all you need is your imagination. 

United breaks guitars.  CNN misses breaking news.  TIAA-CREF saves your retirement.  Social networking can be a powerful tool—or quicksand if you handle it wrong.

When United was unresponsive to Dave Carroll’s broken guitar, he wrote a song and put it on Youtube.  One week later it had 1 million hits.  Now it’s at 6 million.  One person can create a global phenomenon, good or bad, for your company.  Watch out!

In February 2009 a plane crashed in Buffalo.  It was on Twitter within 2 minutes, CNN affiliates carried it an hour and 54 minutes later.

Getting on Facebook and Twitter made TIAA-CREF 15 years younger.

Social media is a focus group on steroids, a platform that’s infinitely revealing of brand value.  The strategy in the space has to be fluid.  What are the influencers saying?  How do we filter out the noise to drive messages that drive the bottom line.  How do we plug those things into an existing channel?  A limited time offer coming from Twitter needs lots of other channels to test customer interest.  On the internet, we can see it happening in real time. 

The conversation about all of our brands has been going on for a long time now.  In the last political season, audiences told CNN they not only wanted to be informed, but involved. They also corrected CNN when it got facts wrong.  Social media democratizes your brand. 

Social media penetrates consumer feelings.  There’s something around consumer emotion that finds unparalleled liftoff online.  There are certain talk drivers that consistently drive the conversation.  A lot of marketers are surprised by this.  Twitter gives real insight into what makes consumers tick.  Word of mouth is now visible, before we couldn’t see it.  Pepsico found out problems with moms’ perceptions of G2 through social media.

Brands now belong to consumers more than to marketers—the job of the marketer is to fulfill the consumers’ needs.  It’s not just about looking at conversations but identifying advocates and activating them.

What can we do to build advocacy?  First and foremost, identify the advocates and analyze the conversations they’re having.  Empower them.  Digital tools require digital currency, so provide them.  Pepsi does that with Twitter promotions, unique opportunities communicated via Twitter—including access to the Yankees tickertape parade on Friday,

The medium is the message, so how do you get your advocates?  There has to be a certain degree of openness.  TIAA-CREF had a lot of clients that lost a lot of money with others.  TIAA-CREF outperformed the market, so there is a lot of trust.  TIAA-CREF’s aid with social media to their clients generated huge benefits and credibility.

There’s lots of positive feedback, not just negative.  Advocates are there to help you as well.  The Toyota Prius Facebook page is an example.  A lot of people wanted to use it as a forum on how to use their car.  Toyota brought their community over and created a separate area for car owners as well as one for people interested in green issues.  Share promotions, be authentic, create a good experience.

The extreme example of doing this well is the Zappos model.  They are incredibly open from a participation perspective.  Zappos does things we see in marketing as operationally impossible.  That’s where they get advocates online.  There is an opportunity to contribute everywhere on Zappos.com.  Amazon bought Zappos because they didn’t know how to do customer service like Zappos.

You can’t manage this stuff, you can only participate and be relevant.  Social media provides an opportunity to change a “badvocate” to an advocate.  “Mea culpas” do work.  Jeff Fleishman worked for Amex for a long time.  Amex customer service’s job is to make sure the customer is happy.  United was dismissive.  Be transparent and hope for the best.  Hands on is good, and humility is really important.

This data can inform every piece of the marketing mix.  Sense and respond.  Digital brings a new sense of agility.  In the old days one couldn’t change things in the marketing mix.  Now one can take early signals and optimize. 

Consumers expect openness.  You need to listen then respond fast.  Iterate and optimize, discover and analyze your audience.  Build connections. Consumer affairs needs to be at the center.

If you do it right, it’s very powerful.  Mess up and you’ll be sorry.

Attention search marketers: display is not just for branding anymore—performance display can work for you! Display goes largely under-leveraged by search and direct response marketers, this panel aimed to change that. So how does direct response marketing use display? This panel, moderated by my colleague Dax Hamman, VP of Display Media at iCrossing proved be another another useful panel with actionable insight and key take-aways for search and other direct response marketers to leverage when considering their marketing mix.
Rob Leathern, CEO of CPM Advisors started off with some helpful insights, “For search marketers, did you know you can use same reporting and info for display as they do for search through the Google Content Network? Also, use your existing search copy that performs for your display campaigns. Keep in mind that translation doesn’t work in all cases, but its a good starting point for testing and tweaking over time. Re-targeting is big for performance display; we see the ROI is between 5-20 times higher than normal display campaigns.”

Recognizing that the whole world of display may be totally new to some search marketers, Dax asked the panel to explain the difference between exchanges and networks, as you hear a lot about them, but how do you know which to go with? Roy de Souza, CEO of Zedo offered this information, “Exchanges are self-service whereas networks sales-oriented with service. Networks tend to have higher quality inventory while the remaining inventory typically goes to exchanges. Direct marketers are beginning to converting to display because of issues of scale with buying search inventory—there’s just not enough, and those who get this are doing well in display”

So whose doing it well you ask? You know all those terrible teeth whitening and belly fat ads you see? Turns out they are making a killing—and doing performance display RIGHT. Below are some insights and lessons we can all learn from this group of, ahem, marketers…

Success lessons from the teeth whitening and belly fat guys:
-Mass market products
-Buy on networks, not exchanges
-Use a LOT of different creative, test and iterate frequently
-Optimize campaigns like a search marketer
-Don’t always push direct response…direct them to an interstitial page with testimonies & info
-Text ads can sometimes make sense
-Sometimes all you need to do is switch up your background color every week

“Really focus on optimizing creative. Simplicity is key—combine that with basic targeting and bid competitively on networks,” offers Div Bhansali, Director of Self Service Products for AOL. So what if you’re not a mass market product advertiser. Let’s say you don’t have teeth whitening and belly fat pills to sell, what then? How do you compete with these guys for optimal ad space when they are bidding so competitively? “We (AOL) have to hold ourselves to higher standard with our inventory than the exchanges so you can bid competitively against these mass marketers on our network.” 

“While unsavory, and while the FTC in conjunction with publishers will start to crack down on these mass marketers as they have been artificially inflating CPMs, they do have a place in the market. We can learn from these guys. They teach the marketplace—and when the teeth whitening goes away there’ll be another scam of the month with more to learn from,” said Leathern in reference to the concern that such scammy mass marketers are affecting the marketplace adversely.

Alrighty, all very good to know…so to wrap up would the panel please offer some basic getting started info?

What is an average CPM and CTR across the board (granted knowing that it depends on category, product, etc)?
-Average CTR across the industry .1%. Anyone getting more than this, like a .2% is doing well
-CPM average $1…of course this varies and depends on quality of inventory
-Display opens up so many varieties and variables—know what you’re selling and who you are targeting, this will affect your cost

What is a reasonable budget to start with?
-$5-10k for tests….but remember there is creative costs
-Creative (and having lots of it to test and optimize) is crucial
-Remember that the long term performance you will get out of investing initially in creative
If you were a start-up or just getting into display, how would you plan your DM budget across search / display etc…?
-Look at potential upside (ROI) vs. cost of testing
-Look at hybrid opportunities like text ad products and set up the right testing methodology for learning for future planning

All you search guys ready for that display testing? Well if you need one more stat to sway you—remember search + display campaigns see 30% lift over just plain old regular search campaigns. Nice!

Connecting online ads to offline purchases is difficult at best.  Comscore published a white paper in 2008 on the dramatic underestimation of display advertising ROI, primarily the result of the fact that any assessment of less tangible brand marketing is qualitative and after the fact.

Online has been held to higher standards than traditional, because everything is measured, and probably because we still need to prove the value of online for branding.  In the past few years we’ve made great strides to prove the efficacy of digital advertising on the consumer funnel.  According to the panelists, we’ve reached a threshold and there are now good technologies that can help us measure.  However, the truth is it’s still difficult to connect the dots between online ads and offline purchases. 

The mix on this panel was interesting: one marketer (Andy Markowitz of Kraft), two agencies (Carl Fremont of Digitas and Richard Guest of Tribal DDB) and two technology companies (Dan Beltramo of Vizu and Andy Atherton of brand.net which claim to provide tools to help read the tea leaves). 

I’ll confess that I usually put more weight on what a marketer says.  Kraft has been engaged in online for a long time, and they have lots of measurements from soft to hard ROI metrics.  According to Andy Markowitz, the only constant has been this: there’s only tolerance for what sells more product: the old saw of “the proof is in the pudding”.

Online brand campaigns and offline-style extrapolated measurements lead to suspicion and mistrust, as well as fears of inaccurate sampling which make brand marketing an easy budget-cutting target.  Most marketers think about online brand campaigns as a murky immeasurable necessity.  Can we use new technology to close the gap and measure online brand advertising ROI?  Can we directly attribute sales lift or brand lift to the online campaign?

The problem is that the online content environment is very fragmented.  Efficient tools have been developed to run direct response campaigns online but there are no (or few) efficient tools to run branding campaigns online.  There are platforms out there but they are complicated and not well developed.  The challenge is to “operationalize” the efficiency of things like multivariate testing, that is to make the analysis routine and embedded in the process.

The numbers are somewhat misleading since the direct response portion is driven by search and not necessarily display advertising.  There are still a lot of marketers who are not convinced of the efficacy of brand advertising online, and some technologies are being developed.  But the bottom line is, it’s still very qualitative.

Consumers don’t understand the difference between “direct response” and “brand”.  The data suggests that on average the offline sales lift vs. online spending is 140%.  The good news is that with digital, we are starting to have the ability to read the effects in real time, even with the tools we have now.  This means you can see your campaign results in days or weeks instead of months, and adjust accordingly.

The key to doing this right is what panelist Carl Fremont of Digitas calls “closed loop marketing”.  It’s all got to be integrated, the old-fashioned well-structured marketing mix, something I’ve been preaching for more than 10 years…  Maybe I can finally stop feeling like a modern-day Cassandra.

Panelists in this session from Digg, Google, AOL, Technorati, and Associated Content address the challenges of monetizing niche properties, applying Chris Anderson’s much-talked-about theory to the blogosphere.

Bobby Figueroa fielded most of the questions, as I’m sure many of the search product and ad reps from Google have been doing at this conference. He spoke mostly about quality, reassuring the audience that ultimately, ads should be information, and hopefully relevant information. You may be tempted to run, say, tooth whitening ads on your site because they far outperform any other kind of ad. In the long run, it’s much better to have high quality ads on your site to maintain viewership.

Figueroa also emphasized the importance of advertising tools (platforms, measurement) for publishers. In order to reap the most benefits (i.e., revenue) from your inventory, you’ve got to get your systems to “talk to each other” and minimize the amount of disconnect. To lower the barrier to entry in the display ad market — which many advertisers shun because they don’t have the budget to create customized creative — Google began offering a display ad builder. More than 80% of its users are brand new to the market.

Jennifer McLean from Technorati then sharing some blogger data. The average blogger is a hobbyist, not a professional — no surprise there. Though 28% of bloggers make money from their property, a very small percentage of those support themselves with that income. The average income from blogs that do generate revenue is about $1500.

For those that invest more time and money into their blog (more than $10k annually), the ad revenues sharply increase. A part-time blogger can make between $20k and $120k a year, and though banner ad fatigue is affecting the industry, CPMs are still consistently fairly high, she said. New, effective “conversational” ads, with live feeds, for instance, will push them even higher.

Patrick Keane of Associated Content agreed: with better targeting and new technologies, they are having more success with inventory. Maybe it’s the economy bouncing back, but it could also be a true sign of the long tail paying out for small publishers. Advertisers are starting to feel more comfortable with authentic, user-created content, and they are demonstrating that those sites can be valuable, too. For example, who’s to say that Paul Krugman is any better than a budget-conscious mom in Iowa to talk about the economy? If people find value in something — specifically because of its usefulness — then that’s all that matters.

From Ro Choy of RockYou…
Build Fan pages — it’s by far the most cost efficient way to amplify your reach across Facebook’s user base. Also consider CPC ads on Facebook: there’s no better place than social media for performance marketing. At one point, Facebook might even be Google’s biggest competitor.

Greg March, Wieden+Kennedy…
The most important thing to do before (and during) a social media campaign is to clearly communicate its role in the big plan to senior management and to clients. You know what you’re going to achieve, but they don’t always know how to draw that straight line between the campaign and the big picture objectives, or business goals.

Also, don’t expect conversions. For all intensive purposes, catching people at the point of intent (i.e., searching for a product/service or information about it) is better place to close the deal. Social media will increase the number of fans and spread your message, but won’t make instant sales.

Chris Cunningham, appsavvy…
Totally agreeing with March: Social media is a conversation, and people don’t want to be interrupted from it to buy something. Because of this, the old metrics simply don’t work. Use new “key performance indicators” (KPIs) to find out the effectiveness of your social campaign. For example, track fans or video views, not clickthroughs or conversions.

Also, don’t standardize social media. The IAB apparently told appsavvy to “run with” their current development and not to try to fit new technology into any kind of bucket. An audience member adds, That’s great. We shot ourselves in the foot 10 years ago by standardizing ad units. Let’s not strangle innovation with doing that again.

David Spark here, reporting for ad:tech at ad:tech NY 2009 and here’s my second and last show report for the conference. Watch this video for a full summary of my findings from today and make sure you watch my show report from yesterday. Thanks again to everyone who participated in interviews. And thanks to you for watching.

David Spark here, reporting for ad:tech at ad:tech NY 2009.

I spoke with Josh Crandall, President, Co-founder of Netpop Research. I asked him what his sense of the buzz on the floor, and he said that he’s seeing a new sense of respect for the consumer. He mentioned the company Upsell which engages with consumers with instant messaging when they visit the site. I must say I saw Upsell a couple of years ago and that instant messaging was fully robotic and a tad annoying. Josh says that it’s changed now. It does start out robotic, but when there’s a response they route the discussion to an actual person.

This theme of respect for the consumer also falls in line with my discussion with Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen who talked about the symbiotic relationship between paid and earned media.

David Spark here, reporting for ad:tech at ad:tech NY 2009.

I just chatted with James Citron, CEO of Mogreet who showed me a demo of their SMS to video messaging application with my video. In fact, they used 20 seconds of my video for the demo. To see it in action, text “SPARK” to 21534 and you’ll see a 20 second tease of my show report from yesterday. 

David Spark here, reporting for ad:tech at ad:tech NY 2009.

I chatted with Ted Murphy, CEO of Izea, the company that makes the paid blogging service, Social Spark. Wonder why I was so interested in them? I had met Murphy before and followed up with him, not just because he’s got two new services, Sponsored Tweets, and sponsored guest blog posts, Sponzai. The idea for Sponzai is your company can write a blog post and another blogger can put the entire blog on their site as a sponsored guest post.

I was more interested in talking with Murphy about his experience working with the FTC on their blogging guidelines. While they’ve always required disclosure for Social Spark, Murphy said what he was most surprised about regarding the FTC’s ruling was that they were really going after celebrities who for years had been hiding their affiliations as to who was sponsoring them.

David Spark here, reporting for ad:tech at ad:tech NY 2009.

I spoke with Pete Blackshaw, EVP of strategic services at Nielsen about the sometimes uneasy relationship between paid (advertising) and earned (blogging and articles) media. I asked how paid advertisers can work better with earned media and Blackshaw said that advertisers need to understand the role that earned media plays with paid media. It can reinforce the message, take it to the next level, change it, or tear it down.

David Spark here, reporting for ad:tech at ad:tech NY 2009.

After a session entitled “Place-Based Digital and Video Ad Networks-The Time Has Come” I spoke with the three panelists, Gareth Ellen, EVP, Director of Digital for Ogilvy Action, Limore Shur, Founder and Chief Creative for Eyeball, and Patrick Moorhead, Director of Emerging Media for Razorfish.

The insights that came out was the need to facilitate the media buying experience, not to worry whether this experience was so new or so different, and to take hold of an experience that’s close to the consumer.