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ad:tech SFO 2008
By Libby Waldo | April 17, 2008
I just got back from ad:tech 2008. As always the floor was packed with a variety of advertisers and advertising solutions. During the show I attended an interesting session about the future of search. The panel included sales people from MSN and Google as well as representatives from Kodak. There were a couple of interesting points brought up, such as the challenge of providing authentic and trustworthy data, without revealing too much about your products’ “secret sauce” that makes it so much better than the competition. Related to this is the fact that advertisers want more data and greater distribution.
One panelist brought up another interesting point - companies on both sides of the spectrum need to be comfortable about “letting go of their brand.” For the solution providers this means making their distribution transparent. For the advertisers, this means looking beyond search-based advertising and accepting that with some distribution (such as social media) there will be the inevitable unfavorable remark. However, advertisers of all types need to look at this positively since it can be an identifying source for what they need to improve upon. And this is true for advertisers of all sizes. Consumers have the power to drive the future of the products they want, big or small. Recently I was at a salon which is located in a “not-so-nice” part of town. Through online reviews of her store, the owner was able to identify that while her services were ranked as top-notch, people didn’t like going there at night because of the neighborhood’s bad perception. In the end, she was able to switch the hours of her store and join an action committee dedicated to cleaning up the area around her shop.
What’s the moral of the story? Advertisers of all sizes can learn from this. We all want more data and more information. Not all the data will be favorable, but those are the instances where we can learn the most. So providers need to provide the clear and transparent information and advertisers need to be ready to accept what the information tells them, good or bad.
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