The Monetising Digital advisory council for ad:tech Sydney 2011 met to discuss the issues that are affecting the market and the content that should be on the ad:tech programme. Here is a summary of the key areas discussed:

Valuing Digital
• What does monetising digital really mean?
• Does digital go beyond the concepts of paid, owned, earned?
• Should we be placing a value on digital rather than a value on monetising digital?
• Brands need to have relevance, have value and to listen. And content is still king.

Internal Challenges
• How do you take the concept of valuing digital upwards in the organisation?
• What are the pain points for advertisers: resourcing, education, margins and agency models
• The only way to achieve what you’re being tasked to do is through better efficiency

Data
• The value of data is only as strong as the insights but how do you resource that? What’s the best way to make that happen?
• There are bits of data but they’re not integrated or attributed or being used to generate valuable insights
• There is a need to understand different analytics to know what you’re making happen. We’re at a transition point. How can we break data / analytics down easier?
• How do you find, track, measure, engage consumers?
• It’s ok to talk about ‘how to make a buck from an ad’, but how do you get better value? What gets measured gets managed, so what do you manage? For a start we can now track consumers throughout purchase cycles
• There needs to be more focus on business analysis as part of the marketing role

Targets & ROI
• How do you decide which KPIs will show value?
• How do you realise digital value now and in the future. What are the digital KPIs?

Channels
• It’s important to treat mediums in the ‘best’ way; use them for the ‘best’ means and outcome. How do you educate brands / marketers on how to do this?
• How do you monetise social media?
• Does everyone know how to monetise different mediums, channels, platforms, opportunities?
• Owning / charging for content is getting tricky. This is where the interest in tablets and apps is coming from.

Understanding / Valuing Consumers
• There’s a shift from advertising-to-consumers to engaging-with-consumers. So we’re in transition at the moment. How do we do it? Associated with this how does the concept of content need to change?
• Software and hardware is liberating the customer & consumer; you could previously ‘make’ a consumer fit in with your brand, now consumer is calling the shots
• Consumer expectations are incredibly high and you cannot afford not to be in this space? And not to be in it successfully.
• What about enforced change e.g. pay to air customers? How have SBS been forced in to change?
• The customer journey has changed – people have shifted what they will / won’t pay for
• There are generational implications and change – what are they?

Valuing Agencies
• Agencies aren’t incentivised to monetise; some clients don’t share their end results
• It’s about vested interest – whose interest is where and what do they get (from the relationship) and therefore what does it mean for performance
• Briefs aren’t around monetising digital, they’re around brand etc. which means frequently the work / campaign answers a different problem

Innovation
• What about the innovation and opportunities to monetise digital? What if you threw open how the brief works and threw it open to customers – Pepsi China did this and got 5000 ideas
• There is a lot of money attached to an app economy; innovation is the answer to how to monetise digital
• Can we go back to start-up phases, incubating the new, how do I do more with less – tomorrow?

Have your say

This is a summary of the points that were made in the meeting. We’ll be working on this and integrating these topics and themes into the ad:tech Sydney 2011 conference programme. If you have feedback on these points or want to make suggestions about additional topics or speakers for the programme then please leave comments or get in touch with me here.

Notes from the other advisory council meetings

Social Media Strategy
Data & Analytics
Digital Strategy
e-Commerce / Online Retail advisory
Unwired Media
Creative & Brand
Entertainment & Experience
Core Digital Media

Who’s on the other advisory councils:

Social Media Strategy
Unwired Media
Digital Strategy
e-Commerce / Online Retail advisory
Data & Analytics
Brand & Creative
Core Digital Media
Entertainment & Experience
ad:tech Sydney advisory council groups named