Friday, May 22, 2009

More Great Sponsor Presos On Monday!

As you know if you read my post from yesterday, I really enjoy the sponsor presos both because they are a great way to learn about new products and a way of getting inside the thinking on the publisher side.

Today’s presentations were from DoubleClick, BrightRoll, and Yahoo.

DoubleClick began the day with a look at key benchmarks by industry – such note taking has never been seen before in an iMedia breakfast preso! ;-) The thing I most appreciated was that 80%+ of the numbers they offered were completely unrelated to clicks. Bravo! Additionally, they gave us a look at some of the new tools, reports, and interfaces available in DFA – they are great evidence that the acquisition by Google is leading to some great strides in usability for DoubleClick.

BrightRoll (disclosure: a former C:SF client, but not a current one) followed with their classically candid preso about the good and the not so good of online video industry practices. They showed some startling comparisons between where ads are running from one network to another – definitely food for thought. BrightRoll has always drawn its line in the sand about content quality – and this year’s preso was no exception. Additionally, they are taking a different path than many of the others in the space – they are NOT creating original content, instead focusing solely on helping advertisers get their messages out there.

Yahoo rounded out the day with a preso about the new developments in Smart Ads that allow you to use the “DNA” of Yahoo information on users to dynamically optimize creative to individuals. Somewhat analogous with what we have seen from the ad solutions sides of Offermatica and X+1, though with the Yahoo user data as the key difference. With thousands or even millions of creative combinations available, the opportunity to optimize creative to individuals is clearly something we will be hearing more about.

More great info, and I offer my personal thanks for their continued sponsorship of iMedia events.

Monday, May 18, 2009

A Big Thank You To The iMedia Sponsor Companies!

First, as an attendee of iMedia, I want to send a shout out to the many companies that make this excellent series of events possible throughout the year.


But I want to thank you for more than that – because sponsor presentations are an excellent time for all of us to understand the tremendous amount of work being done EVERY DAY to make publisher media solutions work harder for users.

Tribal Fusion (disclosure: a C:SF client) kicked off iMedia with a thought provoking POV on how we need to think about the entire purchase funnel and its many stages in order to maximize results. As digital is becoming more of a lynchpin in marketing, we need to carefully understand the various levels of the consumer decision process, and understand what our plans lack. And then find solutions so we do something about the bottlenecks in our marketing efforts. Their presentation was really a statement about the new levels of marketing sophistication necessary to succeed in digital and get better results.


Tremor Media provided a look into their efforts to develop new ways to make online video even more powerful through capitalizing on the interactive nature of digital. But what was perhaps even more interesting were the ways that they are thinking about the space. Their preso offered ample evidence that online video needn't be and indeed isn't simply moving a TV experience from the boob toob onto a putty colored box.

Casale continued their long history of sponsorship with iMedia, and again it was their thinking and ideas that really enriched my experience here. Ideas about the best ways to target and how a relationship should work between an agency and a media partner. I hear both pubs and agencies critiquing each other a lot, and I was pleased to hear Casale put a stake in the ground about how these relationships can improve.


You know, there are a lot of people who poo-poo the network/site rep space, but those that do really fail to see the potential power of a network as a source of insights and ideas -- who better to help us understand what is going on out there than a company that connects with 100 million plus people a month? I am glad to see that networks are out to show us all of the value they can add rather than focus on the basic services they can provide. It’s that spirit of innovation that makes digital marketing such a cool thing to be a part of.


The other two sponsor presentations on Sunday were Appsavvy and DBG. I am going to start with DBG because what most amazed me about their presentation was how incredibly well produced their sponsored programming is. Great ideas…very well executed. I was dumbstruck because I think if you stacked their shows against much of the TV programming out their today, you’d be very surprised as to which programs looked better and hung together better. Beautiful programs centered on real ideas. And the brands really woven into the content -- this is so much more than Paula and Simon holding up curvy red cups.


Appsavvy was very new to me – I was most taken by the scale that they have created with their network of apps. I think the figure was 65MM uniques a month – a clear indication of the relevance of their content. They also brought along several of the developers of their most popular apps – who provided some tight insights on the communities they have assembled and are indeed so close to.


As always, I really enjoyed the sponsored presos and want to thank all of these companies for their patronage of iMedia for without them we wouldn’t have this great opportunity to learn and share ideas.