AAAA Digital Conference
Last Wednesday, I travelled to NYC for the 2008 AAAA Digital Conference. I planned to live blog the event, but this didn’t quite work out. First, my train arrived a bit late, so I missed the first 30 minutes or so. I’m assuming that it was during the introduction that they doled out a username and password for their wi-fi. Needless to say, without the luxury of having this information, I had no internet connection.
While I was initially disappointed, I think it was actually a good thing. With so many conversations happening and information flying around, I definitely would have missed some key items if I had been also trying to craft coherent sentences. Instead of going through the conference session by session, I’m going to focus on the ones that most interested me and were, in my opinion, the most successful.
As I mentioned, due to a late train arrival, I missed almost half of Venture Capitalist Mark Kvamme’s talk. I did manage to catch his introduction of SearchMe.com. SearchMe looks pretty cool, but you have to wonder if it stands a chance in gaining enough users to make it viable. With its visual display, there is the opportunity for advertisers to incorporate much more engaging advertising than the standard 95 characters of text. It also takes a much different approach in displaying the search results, which makes it very interesting.
The next session, which was the first panel of the day, was also very interesting. Three digital agency heads talked about their business models, how they run their shops and how they work with clients. Matt Anthony from VML shared a lot of great information, but the main point I took from him was the idea of not only building sites, but also being responsible for maintaining them, as well as distributing the content. Too often agencies build a site, run a marketing campaign for it, and then forget about it as they move on to the next campaign. Since very few sites explode right from the start, it is so important to continue to refine the site and the means by which you drive people to the site. This is why analytics are so important, though often underused.
During the talks, the AAAA, in their quest to be digital/hip/social, allowed attendees to text in their questions and have them display on the large projector. A fellow attendee asked a question which a co-worker and I had been discussing just the previous week, “With all of the media options, how do you determine the proper media mix for your campaign?” I sat up in my seat anticipating a breakthrough from one of these esteemed agency heads. What they said was something to the effect of, “Get a bunch of smart people in the room; it’s different for every client; you have to continue to test and modify your media plan.” While I was hoping for the magic answer, this is really what I expected and was glad to see that even huge digital shops face the same questions we do.
The third panel was comprised of 5 people in their early twenties. The idea of this session was to understand how this generation uses media and how advertising can fit in. It turned out to much more interesting than I thought it was going to be, but maybe that’s because my media habits are quite similar to many of theirs. Overall, their daily media habits, compared with mine, look something like this:
Check multiple email addresses (same, I have 4).
Read the news (yup, RSS feeds from BaltimoreSun.com, CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post). I think some of the older folks were surprised that young people care about the news, although I’m not sure why.
Facebook (Guilty).
Blog, blog stats, friends’ blogs, industry blogs (Yes to all of these. I check blog stats and read a ton of blogs daily).
IChat/GChat (Yes, again).
I guess the main difference in the media habits of our generation is that we have so many options and take advantage of them. We don’t just watch the big 3 news programs or listen to the Billboard top 20. There are just too many better options out there.
The next session was my favorite of the day. Jeffrey Cole, of Center for the Digital Future and the World Internet Project spoke about all things internet. This guy was really cool, in a totally geeky way. Cole’s opening point was that the cultural change brought on by the advent of television was never fully studied or realized. He didn’t want that to happen with the internet, so the WIP was created to study how people use the internet and the affect that has on culture and society.
Here are a few more thoughts about this conference and suggestions for future events.
1. Have fewer panels. When 4-5 people are on stage it’s hard to get substantial information from anyone. This often results in people talking in general statements without examples or details.
2. Have at least 1-2 presenters that can discuss a particularly successful campaign from start to finish, across different media. I want to know the research that went into it, what the development process was like, how you chose the media, anlaytics, etc. Also, what happened with the campaign on TV, web, mobile, etc.
3. There’s so much talk about at these conferences about integrated campaigns, which is a good thing. But, when you have specific sessions dedicated to both mobile and gaming, you single these media out and discourage discussion of true integration.
Ok, so my trip to NYC wasn’t all work. I had a chance to meet up with my friend Andrea and some of her friends after the conference at this killer dive bar called Rudy’s. I got there about 20 minutes before they arrived and sat at the bar, observing the clientelle. There was an interesting mix of people, to say the least.
Once Andrea and co. got there, we moved to the back patio where we enjoyed surprisingly cheap beers and free hot dogs. The weather was great and we had a really good time hanging out. I stayed a bit later than I had originally planned, but it was well worth it.