AdTech Melbourne, 2011 the low down

From David Trovell, Starcom Melbourne Strategy Director:

ICANN is about to change the internet forever, there are no digital gurus, Microsoft Kinect is the fastest selling consumer device in history and other things I learnt at Ad:Tech Melbourne. #atmelb

The day1 keynotes at AdTech Melbourne had thrown up some great content, could the rest of the conference match up? I hoped so seeing as I was one of the speakers!

Before I get to Day2 keynotes here are a few nuggets that caught my eye from other presentations.

• There are now over 208m domain names; the .com or .org world as we know it is nearly full. So from Dec 2011 get ready for shoes.nike, barina.car and fifa.football. That’s right, TLDs (Top Level Domain names) are opening up. If you are not preparing for this change get on it quick. More info at http://mashable.com/2011/03/28/new-era-top-level-domains/
• “Think Mobile First” was a key message from many speakers. When designing online experiences make them great on mobile first. ¼ of all internet traffic, 1/3 of Facebook use and ½ of all tweets are mobile; and by 2013, 93% of phones sold will be smartphones (up from 54% in 2010).
• Better access to video content looks set to massively increase the amount we view. In the 70’s the average US TV viewer watched 17 hours of video (TV) a week, for the last decade viewing has been stable at 35 hrs, in 3yrs this figure is expected to hit 50hrs per week!
• Australians are the fastest adopters of iPads in the world. 8% of homes have one already.
• Communities like GoMiso and GetGlue are making TV viewing more social; will this save ‘appointment to view’ TV? Certainly it’s a growing trend and will only get bigger with GoogleTV.

Day2 keynote presentations summed up the good and bad of Ad:Tech.

First up was the kind of presentation that I had most feared from AdTech; a social media expert who judged success by the number of likes on facebook. In fairness, Jesse Ringham, digital manager from Tate Gallery in London, did have some good examples of social media. I like the way Tate use guest editors of their FB page, and their rule of, “reward, don’t broadcast” is a wise one. But his myopic view of digital was at odds with most speakers who stressed the importance of judging digital based on real business goals. He can be summed up by the quote, “well everyone is on Twitter now so…”.

However, the day was saved by Haresh Khoobchandani, CMO of Microsoft Asia Pacific. Luckily I did not have to introduce him (!). Haresh was full of good quotes,
“In the future no one will believe your brand”. Already, 90% of people trust peer recommendation but only 14% trust advertising.
“the future is here, it’s just not widely distributed yet” – nice quote!
“there are no digital gurus, we are all just students learning everyday”
“social media should be a feature not a destination of marketing strategy”
“marketing has moved from communications to conversations”
“Kinect is the fastest selling consumer device in history, with 8m units sold in 2-months”
Haresh was an excellent speaker and to hear the CMO of Microsoft say that there are no digital gurus was quite refreshing. He also admitted to being nervous about speaking these days because of the rise instant feedback via Twitter.

We were up next (Shannon Curtis from Target, Jamie Silver from ClearLight Digital and I) and the topic we had been given was, “what should a digital strategy look like?” Our three different view points worked well, Shannon’s inside view of getting different functions to work together, Jamie’s practical guide to digital strategy and my broader view of how digital fits into communications strategy.

Opening with the line, “I don’t believe in digital” did open a few eyes, but closing with “digital is the oxygen of marketing” (stolen from John Sintras) meant I did not get lynched on the way out. Also, it was interesting to see which parts of my presentation attracted tweets.

Overall Ad:Tech’s first appearance in Melbourne was a good one, a broad range of topics and lots of good speakers (IE Media’s Justin Wilden was excellent) but Bonin Bough from Pepsi stole the day. One final quote from Bonin, “multi-tasking is as addictive as heroin”!