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 johnf​mor​ton​.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!).