ad:tech day 2 notes
My thoughts from ad:tech Day 2:Keynote 1: The digital marketing of the Obama campaign
- This was the best session of the whole conference, in my opinion.
- Scott Goodstein, who run the external online campaign for Barack Obama, so everything outside of barackobama.com
- In social media, the Message & Messenger are key
- Customer service is now two-way communication
- You must set online goals
- And be willing to experiment
- The point, of course, is to engage the audience
- Evolution of online fundraising was made possible by: Credit card processing, emails that take you directly to a landing page, meetups that are both online and offline
- So you need to give people tools & ways to organize
- Remember that TV viewership is way down
- And there’s a general media shift from traditional (magazines, TV, etc) to the web, mobile
- So you go from having bigger audiences to having a large number of smaller audiences
- Twitter is good for moving a message around, but doesn’t justify huge amounts of time
- Social networking really works. The goals there are: messages, engagement (reading it, responding, sharing), recruiting donors
- The social networking utilities to use are: social bookmarks, video sharing, photo sharing, file sharing
- The Eventful.com platform was really good for organizing and getting attendance at Obama’s Berlin speech
- Email vs. Social networks
- Email: you own the database, you can track ROI, you can do segmentation
- Social networks: Get you new donors, messages go viral, but no data ownership
- Add a video to a landing page helped them get from $5 donations to $25 donations
- They opened an online store for selling branded items
- They also let people contribute value through services, such as artists who gave images for posters. They sold those posters to get way more value than the artists could have contributed in cash.
- They used online ads to give info on issues, where, when and how to vote, and to solicit contributions
- A mobile phone is with you 18hrs/day; SMS has 95% open rates
- They also built an iPhone application, had ringtones and wallpaper
- Key learnings: change with time, experiment, set deadlines for testing and moving on, let people engage, move ith markeplace from network to network, platform to platform
- One big surprise how willing people were to go along with new experimental stuff, like new MySpace pages for niche events or messages
- Next big social media oportunities are in geo-coding & aggregation
- There will always be something that is the “next” big thing
- How do you stay relevant? Data stays private and owned; now you use it for community organization
- Search can be more creative & preemptive. If you know bad stories are coming, put out your side of the story first and get it linked, indexed and popular.
- How do you get people to engage? Again, it’s the message and messenger, 3rd party affirmation
- Social media needs a dedicated team, which you may be able to pay less; you need a strong culture, but it’s almost all human cost
Keynote 2: CEO Power Panel from the Publishers
- I have to say that I found the tone of this panel rather negative.
- Online spend is so much harder to get than offline
- Why is marketing still divided into digital/new/traditional/above-the-line/below-the-line? All agencies & marketing departments are organized like that, but consumers don’t see things like that or careMost agencies don’t know or understand online
-
There are no good ways to measure offline ads
-
Things like the Obama campaign don’t scale
-
The first deal establishes rules, so doing social media cheap hurts all ad players in the long run
-
Research online creates offline purchases
-
Why spend offline? Because it’s not trackable, so you can’t fail
-
Online analytics are almost too trackable
-
Don’t sell digital advertising – sell innovation & add that to the digital spend
I won’t have any thoughts on the rest of the day, since I had to miss 1 session, and then had to go for my panel. My panel went well – thanks to all who stuck with us until the end!
