Reflections on Ad:Tech Sydney 2009

The Outrider Sydney team were amongst the record number of visitors at this year’s ad:tech Sydney. Here’s what our team are saying about the ad:tech presentations that they attended.

The Relevance Of Twitter

Having been on Twitter for about six months prior to this but really not participating I was really glad to go to this session.

Twitter certainly is becoming a powerful medium online in the United States but the panel of speakers including Mike Hickinbotham of Telstra expect that Twitter will become more and more used and useful here in Australia as a means of engaging with real people and real customers.

The list of Australian brands on Twitter just keeps growing, making it harder to write off Twitter as a fad and more of a force. Household name brand including the ABC, AFL, BigPond, Domino’s Pizza, Fairfax, Jetstar, NRMA, Rio Tinto, Virgin Blue, Vodaphone and even Westpac are on Twitter. Certainly, time will tell if Twitter grows in its revelance here in Australia.

For those who didn’t attend but wish they did, check out speaker Laurel Papworth’s coverage of the session on her blog where she kindly includes the slideshow used for her part of the presentation.

Data Portability – Definition & Business Benefits

The speakers at this session were Ross Dawson, Chairman of the Future Exploration Network, Phil Morle, co-founder of Pollenizer and Danny Housseas, Community Manager of The Data Portability Organisation.

Data portability means becoming part of the world-wide ecosystem of user data across the web. For example, portability would allow us to move user data to different applications, or places on the web, so it can be used in different ways (Think Facebook Connect, where you can bring your ‘friends’ network to new applications as metadata, and you can share information outside of Facebook, such as blog posts, restaurant reviews etc). If we were to consider the internet similar to a stand-alone desktop PC – with portable data, no downloading is necessary, as we can easily edit files or information online.

There is huge potential for data portability, as the internet moves more towards ‘openness’, all the data pools will begin to merge. One of the biggest challenges facing the area is privacy laws and security – who owns or controls the data? When you open a Hotmail account, who owns the account? You or Microsoft? There are many social and moral considerations involved in sharing data across the web.

The speakers were all very passionate on the industry, and will be at the forefront of the new world of ’social’ data sharing on the internet. Data portability has a fairly substantial potential impact on the world of social media, so the next few years will be interesting. I was particularly impressed with Ross Dawson who is a best selling author, with over 100 published articles, as well as being a keynote speaker and leading expert on the future of business.

Measuring Social Media

Unfortunately I was slightly disappointed at how the whole debate was prepared. All the speakers were exposing their own thoughts one by one without really agreeing in the end on how to measure properly social media. Thus it is not an exact science, I was still expecting something a bit more precise. I was hoping for a conclusion at the end of the session. Measuring your audience and popularity or success depends on each and every website.

A brand on Facebook might be looking at how many fans they have, how many people have interacted on their page by posting comments or notes whereas a brand on a video website such as Youtube would be looking at the number of views, number of times its videos have been set as favorites, how many subscribers they have, how many comments on their posted items, etc…

Even when you have exact figures about how your brand is performing on social media, it still does not tell you if you’re performing well or bad! For instance, 100,000 views might be an amazing performance for one brand but a very poor performance for another one.

In the end, measuring social media is still in its infancy but it is something that will hopefully become more and more clear in the short term.

Managing Brand Consistency Across Digital Channels

The speakers are well selected coming with different experieces, each had a different angle to look at the topic from
Was your session well attended?: The session was well attended although it could have been bit longer.
There were a lot of insights to learn, especially learning about the combination of different marketing media and how it significantly increases ‘Aided Brand Awareness’.

Digital media is however shown to be the most efficient medium for automotive marketing in the main case study – but this efficiency largely depends on other media use. So if you put all the media budgets to the digital only, it wouldn’t be as efficient.  Synergy is important.

Further to this, Michale Hauser from Tourism Victoria presented their experience in combining different marketing media as a case study which was quite insightful.

Tags: 2009, ad:tech, data portability, marketing, sem, SEO, social media, sydney, twitter