My OMMA Panel Today

Today, I moderated a session on behavioral targeting and the strategic and tactical implications for creative. It was an interesting topic that I hadn't seen covered before at other industry conferences, and the panel seemed to come to some interesting conclusions. What it comes down to is this: Advertisers who use behavioral targeting could probably benefit from making sure their creatives know that they're using BT. We explored a few angles, including the notion that the ads won't always appear in context (and often don't at all). We also talked about retargeting and bucketing audiences according to whether they've purchased or abandoned - basic database marketing stuff. A lot of that never gets considered during the creative strategy. At one point, the panel essentially agreed that looking at creative performance vs. individual behavioral buckets would probably lift brand and DR metrics significantly, but that many advertisers hadn't gotten to the point where it was a priority to look at the data that way.

Chris Marrow was there from Tacoda and he enlightened us with respect to a recent Tacoda study that compared and contrasted behavioral targeting and contextual targeting. We also had Scott Howe from DrivePM, who talked a bit about retargeting, among other subjects. Rounding out the panel were two representatives from agencies, John Gray from Enlighten and Michael Hayes from Initiative.

At one point, Hayes claimed that nearly all of his clients were using behavioral targeting to some extent. How far it's come in just a few years...

General OMMA Observations

Some topline observations after observing the conference's general mood and a good deal of the Day One content: 1) There are still plenty of people left over from Dot Com Boom Part One who would like nothing more than to hitch a startup to the latest Internet fad and sell for millions. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Unless you don't have the knowledge or substance to back up what you're saying and promising. If I hear about one more business that has something to do with blogging or "Consumer-Generated Content" without having any idea what the blogging movement is all about, I'm going to have a conniption.

2) Let's see. How can I say this without it seeming self-serving? Well maybe I'll just say it... I am once again amazed by the number of people at big ad agencies who get credit for ideas originally put forth by individuals or small ad agencies. I can't tell you how many times I saw a quote in a Powerpoint presentation from some high-profile agency exec and thought to myself, "Gee, I think I heard Dave Smith talking about that a year ago," or "I wrote a column about this six months ago." And there's the idea, attributed to someone at Carat or OMD or Publicis or whatever.

3) I can't believe how much the blogging movement, podcasting, and general interactivity is being dissed here. It would be really easy to walk out of here believing that people are still just consumers to marketers - numbers in buckets on a spreadsheet. And that's because people here are citing flawed stats to try to convince us that blogging isn't as big as people say it is, or that few people will ever listen to a podcast, or that it's only a tiny vocal minority that ever expresses their opinions online. They'd also like us to believe that it's okay to fake involvement and engagement with people, that emerging media are simply broadcast playgrounds within which advertisers can broadcast messages until they find a model that "works." This kind of thinking is going to kill us.

4) All that said, there's a lot of enthusiasm in the room.

5) I've been pronouncing the name of that new Publicis agency all wrong. It's "De-NOO," not "DEN-you-oh," like I had been saying it. Whatever.

Sorta, Kinda Liveblogging

There's wifi at the conference, so I might be posting here and there, depending on how long my battery lasts. Geoff Ramsey is giving the opening remarks, discussing where the growth is coming in the ad industry. He just made a joke about where TV's growth is and referenced Clara Peller. No one laughed - I'm convinced it's because no one remembers the old "Where's the Beef?" commercials.

Interesting stat from the ANA - 78% of leading advertisers think they're getting diminishing returns from traditional media.

Today's Panel at OMMA

I'm moderating today's OMMA West panel at 11:30 on the Advertising track - "Creative in Context: The Role of Behavioral Targeting in Creative." My panel includes Chris Marrow from Tacoda, John Gray from Enlighten, Scott Howe from DrivePM and Michael Hayes from Initiative. This ought to be an interesting one. A lot of the excitement over behavioral targeting is wrapped up in the media - how do we define buckets? What are the best methodologies? What kind of response lift can we expect? But few conferences have delved into the implications for the ad creative.

I'll check in later and let you know how it goes.