Chris Busch

FOOA P.S.

Couple of sites with some more details about the Future of Online Advertising Conference.

BehindtheBuzz has the most comprehensive coverage I have seen.

Lots of links to other sites with coverage over at Digital Perm.

FOOA Day Two

The conference has been excellent. 

I'm a bit weary of writing about it, so let me summarize (in my own words like Mrs. Johnson told me in sophomore English).

• The rate of growth in online advertising is steep which is creating a lot of opportunities for those who figure it out.
• According to a survey by Marketing Sherpa, the combined spend for paid search and online ads for a recent 12-month period is estimated at 12.2 billion dollars.  This is substantial but to give it perspective consider that the spend for direct (postal) mail alone was $58.7 billion, newspapers $30 billion, and even local radio rang in at $15.5 billion.  But online is growing the fastest and is in fact eating into ad spends for many other mediums including television.
• According to Jay Adelson of Digg and Revision 3 fame, forget trying to build Internet video around the Flash player.  You're going to need something portable and something that will work well with that big flat screen hanging on your living room wall.
• Carla Hendra of Ogilvy had a lot of great points including:

Future of Online Advertising - Day One, Part Two

Lunch was "butlered" no less.

This FOOA conference really has a great line up of speakers.  There's almost too much to digest, but I've been busy making mind maps for each of the speakers to help me remember the salient points.  And my MacBook Pro has been performing flawlessly.

Chas Edwards of Federated Media kicked off the afternoon focused on the emergence of conversational media.  For businesses, the key is finding out what your customers are discussing and then try to enter into that conversation.  He noted that Business Week says its blogs are now more influential than its magazine.

Ted Murphy of PayPerPost talked about connecting advertisers to bloggers.  I'm not too big on the idea of bloggers selling ads and I think the number of organizations who can benefit from blog advertising are limited.  But, PayPerPost is a good resource for those interested.

Henry Copeland, founder of BlogAds, was up next.  Blogs could be locations where your customers are carrying on those conversations. 

Future of Online Advertising

I’m in New York today and tomorrow attending the Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference at Gotham Hall.

Online ad spend is still soaring which is creating many opportunities for marketers, agencies, and organizations across the spectrum. If they are plugged in.

Greg Stuart, co-author of What Sticks, led off this morning with a call for marketers to accept the burden of proving that advertising campaigns are actually working. A big key is having universal agreement on the goals of the campaign by all those involved – client, CMO, agency, media planner, etc. It seems rather intuitive, but it is remarkable how little this happens.

How are you going to measure success? Can everyone involved in the campaign give the same answer?

Ron Bellanger, VP of Agency Development for Yahoo!, was next up. A key example he gave was the Kelloggs Special K online campaign at Yahoo which has been measurably successful. You can check it out by gong to Yahoo and searching on “Special K” or just click here.

Bill Wise, President of Remix Media, the media arm of Right Media, talked about the changes in the way media is being purchased. Right Media is providing an exchange model with most transactions being automated rather than negotiated by two humans. With Google entering the radio ad biz, it’s likely that media placement is going to change substantially over the next few years with transactions being handled more like an eBay auction than a horsetrade.

Kim Malone, Director of Adsense online sales and operations from Google spoke about adapting online advertising models. The movement now is from selling ads on a CPM (cost per impression) or a CPC (cost per click) basis to CPA (cost per action). In this scenario advertisers will pay a higher rate, but only for leads that result in an actual transaction.

Then Brent Hill from Feedburner took the stage. Brent talked about the rapidly emerging world of ad insertion into RSS feeds. A few years ago RSS distribution was primarily the realm of bloggers. Now commercial media companies are distributing much of their content by RSS and even more recently, retailers are using RSS to disseminate information and drive sales.

All of this before lunch. I’ve got a bit more than sushi to digest today.

Canada Fishing

Pics and video of recent Canadian fishing expedition.