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HyperTargeting and HyperSelecting: Advertising, Search, Content and Aggregation

The Annual CES show in Las Vegas had a great turn out with 2,700 Exhibitors and over 130,000 attendees. The event had great tracks and sessions ranging in topics from Digital Imaging, Emerging Technology to Sales & Marketing.

The Panel I spoke on was part of the CES Reinventing Advertising Partner Program which delved into interesting topics that varied from exploring Social Networks and User Generated Video’s to looking at how advertising strategies will need to evolve in the diversified, digital culture.

There was a lively discussion & differing viewpoints between Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller, and Eric Hirschberg, President and Chief Creative Officer in the Advertising Strategies panel.

Mark felt that the current consumer is much more driven by facts and data points and tended to research products thoroughly before they made a purchase decision. He felt that is was even more important given the current state of the economy and that having a strong, informational marketing effort was much more important than an emotional marketing message.

Eric disagreed strongly with this and felt that the emotional connection consumers had with brands is still extremely valuable in making the consumers into champions for the brand.

The panel I was on was focused on targeting technologies and was called “HyperTargeting and HyperSelecting: Advertising, Search, Content and Aggregation”. Saul Berman from IBM moderated the panel and asked how consumer behaviors have been changing online and what marketers needed to do to reach them.

I spoke about how consumers are spending more time on the long tail content and how marketers needed to find a brand safe way to message to them while they were on those sites. We spoke about how automation and technology were going to be key to accomplishing that since content is so dynamic on the web.

Jason Glickman, CEO of Tremor Media, spoke about the increase his company is seeing in the consumption of online video and how there was a need to improve the video advertising online by having standards for measurement for video. Saul brought up data that IBM had collected in their 2008 Digital Consumer Survey which showed that consumers were ready for integration and consistency in content and messaging across devices – PC, mobile and TV.

In response to that, I said that Agencies need to change their structure so that one team is coordinating the campaigns and buys across the different mediums. For example, if a product is advertised on the TV show “American Idol” on Fox, then there should also be an online component which runs the same campaign on Fox’s American Idol website as well as all the other long tail fan sites that have emerged around the show.

Everyone on the panel was in agreement that Agencies really needed to move to this integrated model and that there was a need for standardized metrics that could compare a traditional buy on TV or print to an online buy. We also agreed that all the different media providers needed to build open platforms so that Agencies can combine data from all the different online and offline campaigns into one holistic view.

The panel ended on an upbeat note where we felt that though there was a lot of work to do as far as standardizing metrics and building open platforms, we have also made a lot of great progress as an industry over the last few years and show casing how the web is a great medium for marketers. We all expect to see great growth in 2009 and beyond as marketers focus more on how to harness the power of the web to communicate their messages.

What do you think about all the different media providers needing to build open platforms so that Agencies can combine data from all the different online and offline campaigns into one holistic view?

-- Shanthi Sarkar

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