It has been a little while since posting so apologies that turkeys, kids, visiting families and new year celebrations have been a bit of a distraction from the business of ad:tech.  That said, I am back in the saddle now and the first cab off the rank is a bit of a surprise, but still, in the spirit of social media, a welcome opportunity for debate:

TalkingDigital recently posted an article which had some comments to make about the ad:tech program.  The comments, seem to focus on what they feel is a disconnect between where the revenue is flowing within our industry and the balance of topics in the ad:tech program.  Specifically, they would like to see more topics on performance media.  Additionally, they feel there is an inequitable focus put on mobile and social media.  I have pasted some of my reply below as we are very interested in the Brain communities perspective on whether our program should be driven purely by the dollars or by broader factors…

Lets start with the facts we know about the conference:

• Historically, attendance is split equally between Agencies/suppliers, Marketers (or clients ) and publishers.
• There are a total of 30 sessions (3 keynotes)
• Primary feedback from last year was a) more case studies and b) more cutting edge stuff (less digital 101)
• Based on session tracking from last year, social media sessions outranked any other content

So, taking this on board, lets look at the revenue argument as a rational for content allocation:
if we take the IAB revenue splits as a guide to programming then we would have 47% of the 30 conference topics (roughly 16 panels) should be devoted to the topic of search, 28% (roughly 14 panels) to General display advertising (and I am assuming this includes performance networks) and 25% (lets say 10) devoted to classifieds. Now this all sounds a bit dry and we all know that the money and expenditure is divided more broadly than this.

Another approach is to take the AIMIA digital services index .  Here, the picture gets a lot more diverse.  Suddenly online ad spend drops to 21% (down to maybe 9 topics) and things like Digital Direct and Email start to take on more of the lions share.  But of course neither of these statistical analysis’s  even count social media or mobile because, as you rightly point out, no publisher, performance network or media company have figured out how to make big money on it.

Perhaps the other part of this statistical equation that the revenue focus does not account for is what the audience is doing.  Whether any of the publishers or media companies are making money or not, according to a recent report from Steven Noble from Forrester , Three-Quarters Of Australian Online Adults Use Social Technologies.  According to Hitwise, 8% of all visits to internet sites in Australia were to social networks and forums with an average time spent of over 12 minutes. And Twitter last year had usage growth statistics of over 500%..

While it is fair to say, these guys may not have figured how to make real money yet, this is clearly another trend that marketers need to understand even if only so they can make an intelligent decision not to participate. Fi Bendall of Bendalls group wrote an interesting article recently that explores this very point.

So…I pose the question again.  If there is a burning issue that needs to be covered, please elaborate on it and help us debate the case for it’s inclusion, and finally, is it the spend allocations that should drive the content program or is the picture bigger than that?