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Online digital advertising has come a long way. But digital advertising and marketing is not the only thing that was discussed at ad:tech singapore 2011. There were 3 encompassing topics surrounding the entire conference:

• Non-intrusive, ubiquitous, willingness to consume advertising and marketing
• Understanding and utilizing social media as a platform for advertising, marketing, and brand advocation
• New technologies and innovative ideas to create an experiential marketing campaign

Here are my thoughts on all 3 topics after talking to many people, and attending some of the talks.

Consuming Advertisements

There are many solutions out there there provides more interactive and engaging advertising, like playing a game or achieving some goal out of the advertisement. However, with the advent of more digital media content being consumed online, these solutions have started integrating itself into these digital media, largely video. Firefly Video from Tribal Fusion is one of them that is offering such a service. A non-intrusive advertising on your digital video content at the bottom right corner with a “firefly” logo that entices you to hover over it to pop up an interactive advertisement. Other solutions, from Innity, concentrates on providing engaging advertisements to attract consumers to learn more.

However, all these methods are geared towards creating engaging advertisements and allowing the consumers to decide whether hover over and learn more. I personally feel that if you give consumers a choice whether or not to “consume” an advert, the answer is mostly no. Furthermore, most of these solutions do not address the fundamental issue (except maybe for Firefly Video) that content consumed is now moving towards richer digital media rather than text.

If you allow content producers to easily produce content (video, audio, photos) and seamlessly (based on the content producer’s requirements where to put it) insert dynamically selected interactive and engaging advertisements directly into the content (much like a TV network station programming) for consumers to view/listen to the partially-intrusive advertisement for 5-10 seconds (should the consumer want to learn more he can click on the advertisement to learn more) and offer that as a service, together with analytics and performance feedback to the content producers. This is exactly what I’m looking for as a digital online content producer. If it can be done with rich text, why not with rich digital content?

Thoughts?

Understanding Social Media

A lot of efforts, discussions, methodologies, tools were seen during ad:tech singapore 2011, about how social media can make or break your brand, how to use social media as one of the marketing tools to spread your campaign. But many people forget that social media is an organic living being, where relationships become more important than just marketing campaigns. Utilizing the usual marketing metrics and KPIs to achieve your end goal result might sometimes fail with social media as your tool.

The need to quantify relationships and brand affinity through social media is much more important than simply utilizing social media as a marketing tool. That’s where BLUgrapes and Duxton Consulting is trying to solve with their experimental “Social Brand Index” (SBI) to measure affinity to a brand using standard psychological tools. Advertisers and marketers need to understand that social media is a living breathing thing that requires long term engagement and investment, time and effort, to nurture the brand with marketing strategies.

I personally feel there’s a missing audience everyone seems to be forgetting, but everyone is talking about – the bloggers, influencers, the mass social audience. All these efforts are being put into understand what social media is, but nobody including those termed as “mass social audience” actually understand what it is too! How about sharing these findings, statistics,”influences”, tools in the effort to help everyone understand themselves too? To understand others, you must first understand yourself. In order to understand what social media is, social media must first understand itself.

Think about it.

Technologies evolving marketing campaigns

Technology is a tool that can be used to create amazing marketing campaigns, making once thought to be impossible ideas a reality. Lots of new ideas and technologies were showcased, and one that resonated was Fuji Xerox’s 1:1 experience. They utilized technology to automate a lot of the processes and concentrated on using technology to offer personal connection and personalized experience to the target customers.

The upcoming technology that’s slowly gaining popularity is utilizing Location Based Services (LBS) as a marketing tool, gaining mass social audience reach together with game mechanics and physical location tracking to effectively run a marketing campaign. Many case studies of successful use (and unsuccessful) of LBS were shown at ad:tech singapore 2011. I think we will see even more use of LBS, augmented reality (AR), and other such innovative technologies as part of various successful marketing campaigns.

Summary

So those are some of my thoughts on ad:tech singapore 2011 and what was shown there. Hope to be invited once again to ad:tech singapore next year in 2012. Check out the photos after the break: Continue reading »