Jenny Williams met Jye Smith to get a preview from his session at ad:tech - The Relevance of Twitter. Jye shared some of his thoughts on the market, the role of Twitter and what to expect from his panel discussion.

Jye

Things have come a long way since simply sticking logos and products in games. Production quality allows the delivery of in-game marketing messages that do not compromise the quality of the games and provides new ways to engage consumers in this medium with brands. for example Ryf will discuss a recent case study where Nike worked with Xbox 360 and PC games as part of a wider campaign and how stakeholders judged success and failure.

Discover more about Ryf’s session on gaming.


Ryf

Ryf’s session is one of several sessions on the ad:tech program that is addressing how to truly integrate new channels into your digital marketing mix. You can see details of the whole ad:tech program here here.

It’s not too late to book your ticket for the ad:tech Expo or conference program. Registration is open until 5pm on Friday March 6th and you can also register on site from 8am on Tuesday March 10th.

Key features of this year’s ad:tech program include the many brands that are presenting case studies - such as Nike on Ryf’s panel; the excellent international keynote presentations; and all the great networking opportunities and giveaways as part of the Expo floor. You really don’t want to miss your chance to be involved in this event so book now. See you there!

What is interesting to see now however is that as digital evolves and becomes even more complex, the debate is now just as relevant to the digital space itself. The diversity of digital channels from search to mobile, content creation to social media is again, specialist.

At a technical level, even the concept of building a basic website often requires an agency make a choice whether they will use .net, or PHP, whether they will build all their solutions around sharepoint, develop their own inhouse CMS or become integrators of other systems. Do they need dedicated IA’s do their creatives have the muscle in action script etc.

The challenges here are the same, to have expertise, you need experts. Experts = headcount and you can’t carry headcount unless you have enough revenue coming from a particular channel (or area of focus) to justify the investment. I would take my hat off to any agency that can truly claim to have genuine experts in every field of digital both strategic and executional who are fully utilised but not overworked.

So this session on the ad:tech program should be interesting. Cora kicked off the Voice of the industry some time ago with a post about this topic and last week I was able to catch up with Jules from the Hallway to get his take on what the real questions are. To get another perspective we talked to Mike Zeederberg from Profero who takes the position of being both specialist and generalist which is another tactic…

Jules and Mike

I’d be really interested in your thoughts or questions for the panel and if you have any points to discuss here on the brain.
You can see the whole ad:tech program here and you can still book tickets.

I met with Kate Carruthers last week who is chairing the panel on “handing your brand over to the consumer – are you ready to let go”, to get her perspective:

Kate

Kate makes some interesting points about the fact that you can’t really control what people will say, but it is better to be part of the conversation. Some marketers think this is a somewhat uncontrollable thing however it does have some manageable components.

Most brands have at least some advocates as well as some active and vocal detractors. Smart brands already know who these people are and proactively engage in dialogue with them to either inspire on brand content creation or to actively listen to and address issues.

Even the worst situation such as the Dell hell story there can be a happy ending if brands can actively listen.

I am interested in your thoughts on the areas that we should explore in this discussion.

See more about Kate’s session and book your place at ad:tech.

This is a video interview I did with Ben Mangold, Analytics Director with Mangold Sengers who is hosting the “Designing Data Centric Approach to Evolve your Digital Strategy” discussion on the ad:tech program.
Ben

The bottom line is that marketing costs money and everyone is looking to save money. The only way that marketers and agencies will be able to retain and increase their budgets is with hard, definitive proof of what’s working and why.

Many people have predicted that digital marketing will not suffer from the recession in anything like the proportions of the more traditional channels. This we hope is largely because of the infinite measurability we are able to achieve and the very specific tracking that digital enables.
Although many marketers still aren’t analysing at all, some are at least starting on the journey of analysis. Unfortunately once you get into it, you realise that we are capable of producing data at a phenomenal rate, and we have an increasing need to analyse this within shorter time frames. The most important questions then become: what to measure, how often and what tools should you use.

It doesn’t stop there though, there are a plethora of analytics tools available but these also cost money and often measure different things making them hard to compare. Perhaps another question for this panel should be how to measure and justify the ROI on analytics tools themselves.

Let us know any other questions you might have around the subject of data analytics for the panel and we will be sure to include them on the day.

In the mean time, we have some interesting new speaker updates:
Fionn Hyndman, (CEO of dgmAsia Pacific), Jennie Bewes (Head of Online for Vodafone) Anton Sher (Director at Front Foot) and Justin Baird (Senior Product Specialist at Google) have now joined the speaker line up

Also, don’t forget about the competition we are running, submit a question for a panel and get entered to a prize draw, the winner will be announced COB Friday 20th February

Book for ad:tech here