Buying Around Best Buy

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So I went to Union Square during lunch today to try to find the stuff I was going to buy at Best Buy yesterday when I got carded. Circuit City had a better telephone at nearly half the price.

EBGames had both PSP games I wanted at the same price. No annoying waiting for the cashier to remove the anti-theft devices (they didn't have any) and no requests for ID.

BTW, a few people asked me what the offending M-rated game was. It was "Midway Arcade Treasures," which contains emulations of 20-something coin-op video games that Midway put out. Included in that are the three Mortal Kombat games, which are rather gory. (I'm assuming that these are the offending games within the compilation. For all I know, someone could have a problem with Joust or Marble Madness.)

So, mission accomplished. And I got my phone for $50 instead of $90.

OMMA: Some Wrap-Up Comments

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I think Tuesday was a better day for conversational marketing. I got to ask the first question of the morning panel, which featured several friends - Jamie Welsh from Hilton, Shawn Gold from MySpace, Babs Rangaiah from Unilever and Chris Schroeder from Choice Media. After hearing about a number of marketing tactics and vehicles that involved everything from social networking to blogs to viral marketing, I asked a question about participation in conversations. It was a fairly lengthy two-parter, and I asked the panel to tell me about how their companies were handling things like responding to blog posts and comments, or to relevant threads on message boards. I also asked them to tell me, if they weren't doing this themselves, which companies they thought were doing a good job of it. Doug Neil from Universal Pictures fielded the question first. IMHO, he gave an example that really didn't address the query. Then Jamie stepped in. I think she gave a good answer. In fact, she said she didn't know of anyone who really was doing a good job responding and participating.

Later on, I attended a presentation by Jay Weintraub on business blogging. I think he gave a nice overview and left the audience, a mix of veteran bloggers and noobs alike, with a sense of where business blogging has been and what the principles are that are guiding it. And he didn't even go ballistic when somebody asked the obvious marketing wonk question - whether he had any citeable statistics about whether blogs boost sales. (I would have been much less kind.)

I also caught all of Eric Hirshberg's speech about creative. I think he's an interesting guy and he can certainly carry a room, but I disagreed intensely with his assertion that good ad creative can somehow transcend the rules concerning engagement. He used a couple examples, including Madonna's sex book, claiming that people paid $40 for what was essentially an ad. While it might be true that people paid money for it, it's a poor example. People choose to buy books. They don't choose to be barraged with broadcast-model ads every few seconds. And when was the last time we saw someone pay money for ads? (They tried that on iTunes. It resulted in a revolt.)

Tuesday's mood, by my determination, was a better day for conversational marketing. Blogging, podcasting and interactivity-related topics dominated the show's agenda. Monday sort of put me in a foul mood, in part because Geoff Ramsey was citing every statistic he could to show that blogs aren't as big as people might think. But there's something he missed. Conversations don't happen only on blogs. What about on message boards, on personal pages, in chat and in every interactive forum within the medium? He didn't exactly talk about that. I think people need to concentrate less on the blog phenomenon and more on the overarching conversational theme that permeates almost everything that's compelling about emerging media these days. Don't try to force everything into the blog box. There's a lot more to it than that.

Anyway, I enjoyed the show and thought it a significant improvement over last year's show in SF. I'm just back in the office after an overnight flight and I haven't slept much, so it's about time I attacked the pile of stuff that's built up on my desk before I pass out.

Yesterday's OMMA Panel: Ad Exchanges

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Yesterday, I moderated my second panel at OMMA Hollywood, this one on Ad Exchanges. Dave Smith from Mediasmith, Jason Heller from Horizon Interactive and Hannah Bubis from Did-It Search Marketing joined me in exploring the notion of the resurgence of ad exchanges. An enthusiastic Ken Fadner (the guy who started Mediapost) was in the audience and asked quite a few questions. I had reminded people in the audience that one of Mediapost's original missions was to be an ad exchange. Before they figured out that the money was in the content, Mediapost built a bunch of tools to help create a marketplace on their site. It makes you wonder...If exchanges take off again, will Mediapost dust off the tools they invested in years ago and have another go at it?

It was a short panel, and we explored the idea of whether our industry has sufficient standards to allow an exchange to be successful, what types of ad inventory might be sold on exchanges, and which companies are best-positioned to provide the marketplace.