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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Filtered by Category: Conferences

Digital Evangelists Roundtable, Round 1

This past Thursday night I was lucky to be part of group of people got together to talk about the state of digital advertising, technology and what the future holds for marketing in the digital age. John Haake, from Eyeblaster, was the host at ValBella.

The evening wasn’t presented as an Eyeblaster event though. No one talked about their technology or what they were selling. It was just a discussion amongst people who care about making progress in the way marketing is done in the ever-changing digital space. We’re in the middle of a full-on collision of forces shaping how products are created, designed, built, marketed and sold and each person at our little gathering brought a unique perspective on a piece of the action.

This first night’s gathering we spent a fair amount of time talking about what’s going right and wrong in the spending of media dollars. Although it may sound obvious, one comment really stood out to me on how the digital world of media differs from the “traditional” way media was bought. Before the digital revolution when a TV spot or magazine ad ran that marked the end of the media buyer’s job. The planning had happened; the buying had happened. What little work that was left was to make sure your spot ran or that the magazine reproduced the color of your ad properly.

In the digital age though, the moment your interactive pieces go live only marks the end of one stage of a multi-stage process. The beginning of the job was the initial planning and buying, similar to what was done traditionally, but because of the ability of digital to adapt to what you’re finding out in real time, there is a huge amount of work left to do to get the most out of your media spend. Ideally, that doesn’t mean just the media plan is adapted over time, but the creative executions as well. This concept is pretty easy to understand in terms of an online banner campaign where banners are rotated over time based on what’s being clicked on and how a banner’s click through rate changes the longer it is in market, but there is a much bigger scope of information that can be evaluated on a large digital buy and the complexity can lead to many opportunities being missed along the way. I’d love to explore this optimization topic more next time from the point of view of media, account, creative, and brand planning.

The word “widget” was mentioned approximately 112 times, but I lost count somewhere in the mid-60s. Why was “widget” talked about so much? It’s a buzz word of the moment that’s started to stick with people across the marketing industry. The term has stuck, but not a definition of what it means is pretty vague. One person’s widget is another person’s gadget is another person’s embedded video. Whatever you think it is, to get the most out of the widget concept means agreeing on a what you or your client is talking about. Again, here’s another topic that I think we can explore further. 

We’ve got the initial introductory meeting done. I think we’ve done well by getting to know each other a bit. We’re collectively trying to come to a decision on what to do next.  I think “optimization” and “widgets” will definitely be part of the next meeting. It should be fun.

See Ben Weisman, who invited me to the evening (thanks, Ben!), has also written about the night on his blog here. Check it out. Also thanks to Ben and Gefen Lamdan for the photos used above.

Who was there? Amy Auerbach from PHD, David Berkowitz from Marketer’s Studio, Matt Enos from Tribal DDB, Amaya Garbayo from Mindshare, John Haake from Eyeblaster, Liza Hausman from Gigya, Alex Jorissen from Eyeblaster, Lindsey Kollross from MEC, Gefen Lamdan from Eyeblaster, John Morton (me) from johnfmorton.com LLC, Linda Payson from Avenue A | Razorfish, David Pogue from The New York Timess, Adam Romero from Agency.com, Adam Shlachter from MEC, Troels Smit from Eyeblaster, Doug Stivers from Beyond Interactive, Persia Tatar from Media Post, and Ben Weisman from Eyeblaster, Digitas, Bucky Ben Consulting and Dogmatic. (Yes, Ben is a busy guy!).

The Elephant in the Room at PSFK Conference New York

Yesterday I attended PSFK Conference New York. My overriding impression of the conference was that we marketing professionals are all struggling to define what we’re doing. There were loads of smart people presenting their perspective on the web 2.0 world and none of them were wrong, although they often openly contradicted each other.

At one point Rob Kallin, founder of Etsy.com, the online craft market place, and Andrew Hoppin from NASA seemed to be trading jabs about the laugh-ability or viability of Second Life as a useful collaboration tool. Although I personally dislike Second Life due to what I consider a poor user interface, it is valuable to some people. Andrew Hoppin gave the example of people living on the space station being able to share the same virtual space with people back on Earth is a good thing. He’s right! Second Life may be the best existing tool available for that at present.

Noelle Weaver, from SS+K, kicked off the “Social Media” session by asking the attendees how many of them have tried to erase a social media profile in the past few weeks. In a room full of Web 2.0 thinkers, a surprising number of hands went up, roughly 15% by my estimate. A room full of social-media-types erasing profiles? Another interesting contradiction.

By the end of the presentations the Indian proverb about the blind men touching an elephant and then describing what an the animal was like based on their impression. The morale of that story is that basically that people who are too insistent that their personal view is right are ignorant. That wasn’t the case at the PSFK event though. It was about sharing viewpoints and trying to figure out what this gigantic creature in our midst really is. If we keep describing what we feel this thing is and share those thoughts, we’re going to figure it out.

Looking back on the day, Grant McCracken pin-pointed the key to success for all of us in this business with a concept he called “brute noticing.” (Slides from his presentation available here.) It’s a term I really love. He said our clients depend on us “seeing things early and clearly, on grasping new patterns.” Since this creature is growing and changing so fast, no one person can figure it all out alone.

Follow up: PSFK has started posting some of the videos shot that day on YouTube. Below is one where Steve Rubel says the most newsbite-friendly line of the whole conference, “The Web site is dead.” He does admit saying he likes “saying things are dead.” It made for a great line at the conference. For more video from the conference, click here.

The 3 Buzzword Takeaway of SXSWi 2008

I’m on a plane traveling back from my very first SXSWi. If you’re a geek, and there’s a chance you are if you’re reading SuperGeekery.com, there is a special place and time waiting for you down in Austin next year at SXSWi. Put simply, it’s dorks, nerds and geeks gathering in one place sharing/challenging ideas, rubbing shoulders the Internet famous, and going out drinking and partying like it’s pledge week at a college where the jocks are nowhere in sight.

I’ve had many people tell me this week that the scheduled SXSWi sessions are incidental reasons for attending; the people you meet and become friends with are what make this such a special experience. I feel like I met fewer people than the typical geek but I still managed to meet quite a few people that I hope to keep in touch with. If you’re one of them, thanks for stopping by! I’d love to hear from you, just shoot me an email.

If you didn’t attend though, I want to give you a 3 buzzword take-away of what I’m taking home with me, minus the networking and friend-making.

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

Going to SXSW? Let’s say hello in Austin!

I’m really excited to be going to SXSW Interactive this year. It will be my first at the conference, but not my first trip to Austin. Are you going? If not, why not? Check out some of the interesting panel discussions here. There are also lots of interesting events in the evening. Send me an email if you’re going to be there.

Flash Forward Boston: Day 2

For the second day of Flash Forward, my day had a much stronger focus on creativity rather than coding in Flash. That was my intention though. The conference is structured so that your time here reflects your own interests.There are 4 sessions going on simultaneously so each person, by picking which sessions they attend, gets what they want. If you’re a Flash designer or developer, I would encourage you to attend some time.

My first session was Finding Creative Techniques by Garrett Nantz. He showed a variety of projects he worked on at Big Spaceship—Hungry Suitcase for Royal Caribbean, HBO Voyeur, 30 Days of Night, and Glaceau primarily. What has always impressed me about these projects, beyond their sheer creativity, is the high level of production that goes into them. I’ve wanted to peak into their process and see how they actually accomplish these amazing things and luckily, that was some of what he talked covered. I’m sure I can’t properly distill down the Big Spaceship “secret” to success, but based on what I’ve seen today, it’s clear that a great deal of pre-production helps bring these projects to life. If you’ve visited the Royal Caribbean site, you may recognize the lower image to the right. The image you may not have seen before is the ‘planning’ stage of the site above it. A lot of us use this same technique for outlining a site. The level of preparation they go through sounds like it’s on overdrive though. Garrett’s example of experimenting with filming a variety of ink stains in water to get the transitions right for the Glaceau site is a level of detail was impressive.

Later in the day, Craig Swann from CRASH! MEDIA gave a presentation he called Imagination & Technology. I’ve seen Craig’s presentations at prior Flash Forward conferences and wanted to be sure to see what he’s been up to recently. Craig has a wonderful way of pairing devices with his computer with Flash to create some mind-expanding demonstrations. He explains his projects as simple manipulation of basic data, but the results are really cool. I shot some video of one of his experiments below. In case the audio isn’t clear, what he’s doing is using time as a variable when displaying live video. Instead of displaying a full frame of video every quarter of a second (or so), he’s only displaying one vertical line of the video then moving the next refreshed piece of video to the right by the width of the line. This is just a single example of many interesting projects he showed.

The last session I attended on day two was The Blind Sketchmaker: Exploring Evolutionary and Generative Art with Flash by Mario Klingemann. The Blind Sketchmaker is a project he showed that he’s still working on. It’s goal is to create randomized designs, then, based off of learning it accumulates through asking Mario what images qualify as art and which do not, determine if that generated design scores high enough to qualify as “art.” You can see on of the pieces of “art” here to the right called Sit and Watch. What makes this so interesting is that the definition of what is art is highly subjective. Can a computer program be taught to recognize it? It’s a highly complex process your brain goes through to determine if one image is “art” or just random data. His system is still in development but it’s a really interesting concept. I hope Mario will be posting some of the presentation on his website, http://quasimondo.com.