First Impressions
IAB took place in Times Square New York, a rather fitting place to cram agencies, marketers and publishers/content creators. The conference attracted just over 1000 attendees, most coming directly from the industry. The conference also attracted the big 4 search/portal companies: Google, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, who all gave their take on what was happening in the online world for the most part.
Both days were filled with lots of networking, a talkative crowd that were genuinely interested in the material. Most talks concluded with everyone rushing the stages for copies of presentations or a battery of questions for the presenters. As much as I want to pretend I didn't participate in that... Anyway, Adobe and Google's ideas for creative were fairly surprising and now, for me, fairly anticipated. I got a nice opportunity to visit the exhibit hall and catch up with some of the good folks from Mindspark and a few affiliates.
And who could forget, Mr. Ashton Kutcher walking across the stage while everyone wondered what bizarre world they were in. Turns out he's got a new mediacontentprodagency named Katalyst(HQ) and talked cogently and at length about social media, web content and crowdsourcing. I also left with a vague feeling that powerpoint could really use some work to make it more engaging to marketers, creatives and agencies :).
The Creative Revolution
So where is the interactive industry now? After speaking with a myriad of people at the MIXX Conference and soaking in a lot of the presentations, figures and secret sauce from the talks, I'm not sure if that particular question has been answered. Interactive seems to be in that compression before the explosion. What MIXX09 focused on was divining what it could be - to be more blunt - "More(!)".
We all want more. First, there's the creative/marketing side that wants more ad units, more tracking, more outlets, better inventory, new and exciting ways to promote easily across all screens and make advertising on the Internet and 'net-powered devices - not just the Web. Second, there's the publishing side that wants to collect money for their content despite a harrowing race to the bottom situation where the crowd produces lower fidelity information for free, and often times, faster.
The general feeling was to embrace a two way communication with consumers. Instead of marketing to them, get them involved in your brand, get them to willingly create content for you and watch for critical mass surrounding emerging technologies and know it before it escapes. There was a lot of talk about engineering the viral instead of hoping it will simply go viral as well as playing with models of freemium - offering free content that switches to paid content based on a set interaction limit / device configuration. The chatter about how to balance content and advertising is still just as hot as ever.
What this Means for Neverblue
The creative revolution is definitely happening all around us, but like all media before it, interactive advertising is generally morphing from a global ad campaign to a local, targeted and tiny focus, and this puts Neverblue and affiliate marketing in a good spot for the future. What I realized is that as the granularity of measurable audience details increases in this space, the more it's going to push interactive marketers to be very, very prolific with ad creative and campaign/platform designs. Our publishers are much more specialized to work in exactly this type of entrepreneurial climate. I'll be interested to see what happens when the revolution's dust settles.
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