OMMA: Some Wrap-Up Comments

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

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.

Today's Spin

Today's Spin makes the point that the good podcasts out there are the ones that interact with their audience. It seems like a simple point, but judging from what I've heard a few people say at OMMA over the past day, one that is sometimes missed. From what I gather, a number of advertisers and agencies think podcasting is niche radio or niche television (in the case of video podcasting) and they look at it through that broadcast lens we all know and love (not). But I believe that the audience has a different expectation of podcasting - one of interactivity.

Look at many of the successful podcasts. How many of them are solely a push vehicle? Not many, huh?

I used Across The Sound as my example in this Spin of where the expectation is for listeners and of how a podcast is properly executed. Why? Joseph is doing the interactivity thing very well. He has multiple feedback channels set up, he spends significant lengths of on-air time dealing with listener feedback, and he happens to be dealing with a subject matter that should be of interest to my Spin readers.

I believe podcasting is best executed as the push mechanism for a push-pull dynamic that is used to engage an audience in a conversation. What I didn't have room for in this particular Spin piece was how this plays out in my own podcast consumption habits:

* Rocketboom - A decent job with interactivity. They have comments, story links and story suggestions for every episode. Probably could do a better job engaging commenters, but at least they're giving viewers a voice.

* The Onion Radio News - Some dork reading quick one-minute Onion-style stories. Tragically unfunny in this medium and not interactive at all. I unsubscribed. Right after they started taking ads from Chili's.

* Across The Sound - Great job.

* The Ricky Gervais Show - Funny as hell. E-mail newsletter, show notes, on-air interactivity. I like.

Notice a theme here? The ones I enjoy tend to be the ones that are actually engaging. There's an audience dialogue going on with the best podcasts, and that's what I hope the marketing industry understands.

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...