Conversational Marketing Summit – 2011

Attending conferences is the best way I know of to stay on the edge of what is happening in the world. Reading content on the Web and exchanging messages is vital but there is no substitute for attending a few conferences per year where you can talk to people at meals and breaks plus interact with sponsors and speakers. This was my second year to attend the CM Summit, a conference run by John Battelle. John has a long history in journalism and the media industry and is founder and chairman of Federated Media, an Internet advertising company which appears to be prospering. John brought together a good set of sponsors and 32 excellent speakers.  The conference included news and views from some of the industry leaders in digital marketing. The two days included thought provoking case studies, insights, and conversations with major brand advertisers, agencies, and digital media companies.

The conference started bright and early Monday morning in the Hudson Theatre at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Manhattan.  A full stream of the confeence is available here, but I will touch on a few highlights — mostly things I tweeted about (@johnrpatrick) from the iPad during the conference. Conversational marketing is all about a dialog between consumer, marketer, and publisher.  You could also say it is the new advertising model.  Major brands like American Express, P&G, Sony, Visa, and General Motors all talked about how they are morphing from traditional advertising to developing digital conversations between their brands and consumers via the social media. You could say it is a matter of survival. Laura Desmond, CEO of Starcom Mediavest, a multi-billion agency summed it up by saying that “business is not what it was”. She talked about how advertisers are more willing to consider new channels such as content, conversations, and real-time communications between a consumer and a brand. “Everyone will have an IP address”, is the advertiser’s way of saying that they want to connect directly with individual consumers. A lot of the presentations had to do with targetting. Advertisers really want to send a custom advertisement directly to our mobile phones based on the then circumstances of you and their products. I did not hear one of the presenters question whether consumers are happy about that. The privacy issue is getting a lot of attention, as it should. The new phrase is online behavioral advertising (OBA), and a new icon to signify OBA on compliant web sites will provide a link to a page to learn who is targeting you and where data about you is collected. It will also show your cookies and what they contain and enable you to opt out. People want transparent brands that reveal their intentions and actions. OBA will help make that happen.

Rob Cicone from AMEX said that 44% of small businesses use Facebook and 15% use LinkedIn. Your Buzz is a new Amex tool to help small biz manage their presence across all the major social networking tools. Their goal with the free service is to build a relationship with the small business that will eventually lead to the business accepting the Amex card. David Karp, Founder of tumblr, talked about how they have built a place to post things, customize your web page, and build a community. They claim to be the 26th largest web site with 7 billion pageviews per month, 80 million unique visitors per month, and 45,000 new users per day. Facebook has no guarantee to be the biggest and best social media in perpetuity.

A Finnish company called GetJar has an app store for mobile. They said the app industry is $30-50 billion with 50 billion app downloads projected for 2012 and said apps are media, not content. Not sure that is a significant distinction. I do agree with them that apps are in the early stage; like websites 15 years ago. With Apple’s new Lion and iOS 5, they are sure to get the Lion’s share. Adam Bain from Twitter discussed the new deep integration of Twitter with iOS 5, which means you can tweet from within an app. Could be profound. Hope it is not an exclusive arrangement. I have always thought of Twitter as a protocol for the Internet.

Pepsi talked about real-time marketing. Lady gaga walking down street with a Pepsi. Someone at Pepsi notices and minutes later, tens of millns of people see an ad based on a Pepsi tweet. I thought most significant was that Pepsi and GM and the other big brands were represented by young “with it” marketing execs. I am sure they are not the “chief” marketing officers. Some had weird titles like global director of brand awareness and innovation. A mouthful but important that the major companies are trying hard to figure out how to capitalize on the new social media, because it is really big. Guy from Yahoo! wav very bullish. Head of sales for Facebook said that they reach more people everyday than American Idol. They are running 30 billion status updates per year.

The highlight of the conference was William James Adams, Jr.,  better known by his stage name will.i.am or as  a member of the hip hop group The Black Eyed Peas. He had an uncanny saavy about marketing and innovation. I was greatly impressed with his focus on philanthropy and helping inner city kids with education and housing.

Tags: advertising, battelle, black eyed peas, brand, cm summit, conference, database of intentions, digital media, facebook, google, hudson theatre, marketing, social, social media, social networks, tumblr, twitter, will.i.am, yahoo

Conversational Media Summit – Part 3

The main strategic takeaway for me from the CM Summit was the stark contrast between the two interviews John Batelle had with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Arianna Huffington.

I first met Arthur at a technology conference roughly 10 years ago. He had a big head-start in adapting to the changes from the Internet, he hired some excellent people to work on an Internet strategy, and I was optimistic that the New York Times would be a leader in making the transition to the digital age of publishing. His opening comment at the closing of yesterday’s conference may have proved me wrong. He said that “digital is the future – in the long run.” The addition of the term “in the long run” offers a glimpse of how things may be going in the New York Times transformation.

At the launch of the iPad, the New York Times proudly presented their news app. Of all the more than 100 apps on my iPad, I would have to put it near the bottom. The name of it tells the whole story – Editor’s Choice. If there is one thing we all know about the Web, it is that the long tail prevails. In other words, readers make their own choices as to what they choose to read, and it may be something quite obscure to other readers. The New York Times app includes just a handful of the many stories that they produce. To even consider a name of “Editor’s Choice” is not even close to the way empowered users of the web are thinking. Especially when it comes to news — it is the reader’s choice not the editor’s choice that matters.

Arthur also made it clear in his comments that the follow-on app and web access to New York Times news will require payment — there will be a cap placed on how many New York Times articles can be read before the reader has to pay. Wired Magazine ran a story the next day about the New York Times decision to convince Apple to remove the new Pulse app from the app store. Pulse, developed by two students at Stanford, is one of the best applications on the iPad. It provides a very user-friendly way to read news feeds from multiple sources in a very enjoyable way. The New York Times has concluded that having their news feeds in Pulse is a violation of their policy. This is ironic, since you would think the more readers, the more apps — including the New York Times — the more pageviews, the better, since all of their stories include paid advertising. Also, given that most Times news is available in news feeds, why would someone pay for news through a Times reader when they can get it through a free news reader? One senior Times person told me they are not sure RSS feeds are going to survive. I would say that RSS feeds going away is about as likely as email going away. If you think I am harsh take a look at what Wired had to say about this.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Arianna Huffington as she came on stage for the closing day conversation with John Battelle. I had last seen her during a campaign speech when she was running for governor. She did not strike me at the time as very saavy about business but I was sorely mistaken about that. She has an incredibly diverse background, both politically and career-wise, and I was highly impressed with what she had to say. In fact, her view of the Huffington Post was exhilarating. She described the future of news, whereby their 130 employees, supplemented by 6,000 bloggers, are creating a new “Internet newspaper” online. The bloggers are not random. They have a  process through which the submitters are vetted and in a sense compete to be a HuffPo news provider. Arianna claims the company to be profitable, and I have no doubt that it is, as advertisers are seeking to connect with readers in a rejuvenated way. Her vision of employing and leveraging the social networks was right on as far as I am concerned, and I believe that we will soon see that the Huffington Post exceeds the readership of all the major online news media, perhaps including the New York Times. At 28 million estimated unique monthly visitors, it already exceeds Fox News, Reuters, the LA Times, ABC News, and USA Today.

Based on what the two leaders of these news organizations had to say, my conclusion is that the New York Times will be offering the news model of the past, and the Huffington Post will be offering the news of the future.

Other conference related stories on patrickWeb

Tags: advertising, Arianna, Arianna Huffington, blog, brand, conference, digital media, Huffington Post, HuffPo, IBM, marketing, New York Times, NY Times, nytimes.com, rss, rss reader, social networks, sulzburger

Conversational Media Summit – Part 2

Being a believer in Boxee, I have been following CEO & Co-Founder Avner Ronen for some time. He offered a very clear view of the future of TV. He said the graphical interface we see from our set top boxes is “embarrassing”. What you get on your iPhone and other small devices is actually getting pretty good but the big screens and flat panels in our family rooms have lousy interfaces. He makes the valid point that people have proved they are willing to pay for music — they will pay for Internet video too. We just need those controlling the content to be willing to make content available. Looks to me like traditional TV will be slow to do so and meanwhile many new sources of video are showing up. Revision3 is a good example of an early Internet TV “station” that seems to be doing well. There will be thousands. I thought Avner’s most important point was that the model that needs to evolve is to pay once and watch everywhere. (The same is true for news. It is ridiculous to have to have a Wall Street Journal subscription on your Kindle, another on your iPad, and another on the web).

One of the most knowledgeable people I can think of when it comes to the business models of the Internet is Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley. I remember years ago when she made a very bullish presentation about eBay. This was when all eBay had for sale was baseball cards. People at the conference looked at each other thinking she had gone off the deep end. In fifteen minutes she painted a picture supported by metrics of where things are headed. A few key examples — more smart phones than PCs by 2012, mobile infrastructure now at critical mass, iPad usage more like a PC than a phone, USA now the innovation leader in 3G, bullish on advertising, Amazon growth accelerating, social networking now exceeds email traffic. I would add that the Internet has grown beyond infancy but is still at the early stage.

In addition to the many other excellent speakers and panelists there were two interesting demos by sponsors. First was Stickybits. Their idea is not new but their implementation is timely. Stickybits has a method to attach digital content to real world objects using barcodes. Let’s say you have a motorcycle. You put a stickbits barcode label on it and scan it with the stickbits app on your iPhone. You can then add content — a picture, maintenance records, a story you wrote, music, anything digital. Now you can take the bike to a dealer for maintenance, they can scan the barcode and see all the information on the web site. Or you can scan the barcode on a book and find a review you wrote, someone can scan a code you put on your business card and they can read your resume, scan a for sale flyer and get details on the item, or friends can scan your holiday card and read the annual family letter.

Tags: advertising, barcode, brand, cloud print, conference, digital media, ePrint, HP cloud print, HP ePrint, IBM, marketing, print, social networks, stickbits

Conversational Media Summit – Part 1

Attending conferences is the best way I know of to stay on the edge of what is happening in the world. Reading content on the Web and exchanging emails is vital but there is no substitute for attending a few conferences per year where you can talk to people at meals and breaks plus interact with sponsors and speakers. This was my first year to attend the CM Summit, a conference run by John Battelle. John has a long history in journalism and the media industry and is now founder, chairman, and CEO of Federated Media, an Internet advertising company which appears to be prospering. John brought together a good set of sponsors and 30 excellent speakers.  It promises to be a chance to hear from the leaders of digital marketing for two days of thought provoking case studies, insights, and conversations with major brand advertisers, agencies, and digital media companies.

The conference started bright and early Monday morning at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Manhattan.  John kicked off the conference with an excellent overview of where he sees the future. The theme was “Marketing In Real Time” and the basis of the theme is, of course, the rise of mobile platforms. A “rise” may be an understatement when you consider that the iPhone has gone from zero to fifty million in three years, Android from zero to sixty thousand per day in two years, the iPad from zero to two million in sixty days, and the impending launch of thirty or more new tablets. Built on this base is the rise of local platforms. Yelp has seen 10X growth in three years. Foursquare from zero to two million in two years. Google has integrated local, maps, and business directories into “Places” and Facebook and Twittr have built location into their models.

On top of that base we see the emergence of real time platforms that constantly stream signals across the Internet. Twitter users are now generating 65 million tweets per day and Facebook 60 million status updates per day. Google just purchased Invite Media to create real time marketing of advertising slots. All this is enabled by the social platforms — Facebook has grown from 30  million to more than 400 million users in less than four years and Twitter from one million to 125 million in the same time-frame. All this means a lot of data that did not previously exist and it offers an enormous opportunity for the advertisers of the world to reach people in unprecedented ways. John Battelle calls talks about “The Database of Intentions”. It falls into five categories.

The purchase – What I Buy (Amazon, eBay, Walmart)
The Query – What I Want (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
The Social Graph – Who I Am, Who I know (Facebook, myspace, Google)
The Status Update – What I’m Doing (twitter, facebook, Google)
The Check-in – Where I am (foursquare, yelp, Gowalla)

Privacy vs publicy — Who owns all this data?
Open vs closed — Who gets to play and on what terms”
Publishers vs. Marketers vs. Platforms — can they all get along?
Will regulators sleep through all this?

Tags: advertising, amazon, bing, brand, conference, database of intentions, digital media, ebay, facebook, foursquare, google, gowalla, IBM, marketing, myspace, social networks, twitter, walmart.com, yahoo, yelp