adtech

I've temporarily misplaced my notebook from the adtech conference, but wanted to get some thoughts up in the meantime... more to come soon. Overall the conference had its ups and downs, but for the most part was great. Lots of buzz-like words and acronyms were dropped ("behavioral targeting") but looking past that the emerging themes were helpful.

Main theme of the breakout sessions I went to was the idea of engagement - providing value to your customers before interrupting them with a message to "buy, buy, buy." It's a good thing that a lot of clients seemed to be walking around - several people from Xbox, Microsoft, Yahoo! - for them to have an understanding of all this is a good way to get the sea change jump-started.

There were a few excellent sessions - viral/WOM and left coast creative sessions especially. Benjamin Palmer of The Barbarian Group stated that a lot of their work and alot of other out there viral, like the Milwaukee's Best Light beer cannon, is done when there's not much more choice - when companies are losing market share and think, "ok, there's nothing else we can do, let's put something together and see what happens." I enjoyed hearing about the Rolling Rock work from Goodby - how they created a controversy with their fictitious CMO Ron Stablehorn apologizing for ads that were distasteful, etc. to move the conversation away from the Latrobe, Pa. plant closing down. Great use of available tools.

more to come...