ad:tech University is an intensive course designed to provide content and networking opportunities for those who are new to digital media & marketing. In just one day you will traverse the most important topics in the digital space, upskilling and enhancing your capabilities in the market. We’re very pleased to welcome Ben Cooper to the program:

Mobile

Ben Cooper, Digital Director, Three Drunk Monkeys
Ben’s trajectory in digital media runs parallel with the history of the medium. With 14+ years experience across London, Zurich and Sydney, Ben is a digital strategist regarded internationally as a forward thinker in this space.

Since 2009, he has been the Digital Director at awarded creative and content agency Three Drunk Monkeys – building the company’s digital team and capability, and maximising opportunity for leading finance, telecommunications, tech, FMCG and entertainment brands including UBank, Telstra, Google, Parmalat and AUSTAR.

As the New Media writer for Inside Film magazine, he wrote the cover story interview of YouTube co-founder Steve Chen. He has also featured in Desktop, Creative, AdNews and B&T and was interviewed by the ABC Media Report on the future of advertising. He has judged the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Awards for the past three years, the Cannes Young Lions, Creative Showcase, Creative Hotshop and AWARD Awards.

He “gets it”. And looks forward to continuing help invent it.

Follow Ben on Twitter: @benhamin

Ben will be speaking on mobile at ad:tech University. You know that mobile needs to be a part of your marketing & advertising plans for long term strategy and specific campaigns, the challenge is getting started. When do you start to plan for mobile and how do you integrate mobile into your whole marketing & digital strategy? Ben has worked on successful campaigns and strategies that have included mobile as part of their communication plan, he understands how mobile should be addressed for best success and will share his key thoughts and ideas with you.

Last year’s ad:tech University SOLD OUT so don’t delay in booking places for you and your team.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Nice summary article here from the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones on how advertising on mobile is changing and where we can expect it to head. His report comes from Mobile World Congress, the annual event dedicated to all things mobile, and his key points are around local search, video-on-mobile, and advertising-in-apps. There’s also a good summary video here. While we’re at it, a nod to BBC Click for their technology content generally.

Some of the themes and trends in these articles will also be discussed at ad:tech Sydney. We’re not just about mobile, we take the key issues and discuss those in depth in relation to the marketing and advertising potential. Here are a couple of the sessions at ad:tech that pick up those major themes:

How To Maximise The Effect Of Mobile For Brand Engagement

This Keynote Presentation is on March 10, 2pm, and it’s FREE to attend. Nick Wiggin, Head of Advertising Strategy & Partnerships, Ericsson will take you through some of the global campaigns, product and business models that are delivering return through mobile. It will be great to get Nick’s international perspectives on how mobile is shifting and his selection of case studies on the best ways to make mobile work for you.

Future Gazing, Unwired Media

Jennifer Wilson, Director, The Project Factory and Ben Cooper, Digital Director, Three Drunk Monkeys will be talking all things tech including HTML 5, Windows 7, Blackberry Torch, all new tablets, Android, cloud computing, browsers, the mobile wallet. It’ll be 45 minutes of pure mobile technology chat and thoroughly insightful & useful, if you can keep up…

The program for this year’s ad:tech Sydney CONFERENCE is looking great. We have a number of interesting case studies being presented and a lot of speakers from companies dealing with truly cutting edge technologies and approaches to digital media. Here are some of my personal favourites at the moment:

Throughout my research & meetings the issue of how to integrate mobile in to the digital plan effectively and strategically was constantly questioned. People wanted examples of succcess from agencies, suppliers and brand leaders. The opening session on track one of the CONFERENCE program “Achieving An Effective Mobile Strategy” will provide some real facts and direction on this topic. With speakers from Front Foot, Sportsbet.com.au, Ericsson, InMobi and Time Out Sydney the opinions, experiences and conversation will be incredibly valuable and provide some real advice on this important area.

The opportunities of social gaming – how it can fit with a mobile & social media strategy and help to increase brand awareness, engagement & connectivity – are really interesting and show another morph of media and consumer behaviour. The “What Are The Engagement And Branding Opportunities For Your Brand Through Social Gaming?” with Soap Creative, 3rd Sense and Australia Online Research will be a fun, lively session showing you new and surprising ways to work with games as part of your marketing plan.

It might be a bit obvious that I like this session but “How To Use Apps Successfully For Specific Events” will be an excellent discussion. We’ve got two brand managers, both working within live events but for very different markets talking about how their app strategy and execution came together. The challenge with live events is having a very crystalised deliverable date (the event) and using an app to get real benefit for your market and for your deliverables is a challenge. I look forward to hearing what Jill Colvin (Sydney Festival) and John Curtin (Totem Onelove) have to say.

When we had the online retail / e-commerce advisory council meeting one of the issues we discussed at length was how social media can best fit into the online shopping experience. Should it be providing information to consumers? Connecting consumers? Used as a search channel? Providing customer support? All the above? In “What Does Social Mean For Online Retail?” there are excellent examples of working with social media in the online retail space from Shoes of Prey and Myzerr.com. I fully expect that discussion to keep going and going…

Any questions or thoughts on these sessions let me know. I’m keen to hear whether we’re including the content and opinions that you want to hear on the ad:tech Sydney CONFERENCE program.

Plus, tell us the session you’re looking forward to most…. (the Networking Drinks don’t count)….

cheers, Lucy

Registration

Book your ad:tech Sydney CONFERENCE pass to gain access to all event features.
Book a free ad:tech Sydney EXHIBITION pass to gain access to the Keynote Presentations, Breakfast Briefing, Expo Seminar Theatre, Networking Party and of course the EXHIBITION.

ad:tech Sydney
9-10 March 2011
Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre
Register for ad:tech Sydney here.

The Unwired Media 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:

Trends
• What’s coming, what’s used, what’s under-used, changes in user statistics
• How is the scene shifting?
• Where are the eyeballs?
• What will the impact be? Do consumers, clients, agencies need education?
• What happens with rights, copyrights, negotiation / renegotiation when technology changes

Apps
• Strategy around apps and which technology do you plan to build for
• To app or not to app
• How many versions of one thing do i need to build?

Carriers
• What impact are carriers having on market?
• Carriers affect the market a lot because they take % of revenue stream
• Carriers affect business models
• Monetisation is therefore far from optimum and customer experience is not optimum
• How do the incumbents adapt, change, adopt?

Strategy
• Companies (agencies and clients) need a mobile strategy
• Where does responsibility for mobile sit?
• Brands outsource a lot – they think it is something they ‘don’t do’ themselves but really they need to take responsibility
• Currently mobile strategies don’t take into account the size of audience that mobile delivers
• Mobile is currently the ‘tack-on’ channel and agencies have responsibility in creative stage to plan for mobile
• Mobile is a device for consumer engagement: social, local, personal, global
• How do you approach the different mobile environments: POS, home, mobile (literally moving around)
• Indoor and outdoor unwired; ‘the unwiring of our interfaces’, consumer input and access to devices
• Primary display is going to internet, what are the analytics on this?
• How and where do you spend money on mobile for effective advertising?
• Clients don’t currently have budget and plan for mobile
• Focused mobile strategy: why do it, what is end result?
• Can you improve your customer service through mobile

Consumer experience
• How is technology changing the customer service experience?
• How is technology changing business models?
• How does mobile affect the customer experience of all products and services including unexpected / non technology products and services, e.g. mining, auto, pharmaceutical, health etc
• User experience is different between platforms and devices
• What does this mean for the customer, how do they perceive this?
• What’s in the way of how consumers use / consumer media?
• Consumers don’t care where they are, they don’t want to make decisions, they just want accessibility.
• There are opportunities for business but also a lot of threats
• The removal of technology is as important as the development of it
• Transformations are happening in business because of paradigm shifts in mobile usage and will be further impacted by battery life improvement
• Mobile allows you to be part of the product and there’s more opportunity around crowd
• Experiential changes, consumers are being taken to a product not a store. NFC and other technology will impact online retail.

Gaming
• Immersive mobile game playing experiences should be used by brands
• Story telling engages consumer in experience, mobile allows consumer to participate in story
• How do you measure engagement and results?
• Cost of this experience – you don’t know actual ROI
o WOM
o Branding
o Position as innovative and creative
o Influencers / advocates
o The value of this was higher than actual money

Privacy
• All issues around privacy inc. Facebook
• ACMA guidelines on location and ‘check in’ are like the Spam Act. The Spam Act is now well understood so, how can we educated on privacy in the same way?
• There will be an explosion of concern at some point
• Where will /does all your data go?

NBN
• People don’t realise how important it is or will be.
• CSIRO have worked on a level of progression on wireless that’s four times faster than what currently exists. So NBN may not mean anything by the time it comes around.
• What does NBN mean for all businesses and industries
• NBN has / will unleash creativity and freedom for products, businesses, marketing, communication
• Although we’ll get NBN, moving data around the house is still a challenge. So, what’s coming for in home for the consumer?

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
Monetising Digital
Creative & Brand
Entertainment & Experience
Core Digital Media

Who’s on the other advisory councils:

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

We spent some time thinking about this council and what we should name it. Last year we had the ‘Mobile’ council but since the iPad’s launch, the expectation of other tablets in the market and the morphing of many devices to a mobile environment it made sense that we made the group more ‘universal’ in its appeal.

We know we could host a two day conference on mobile technology, the changes, the opportunities, the impact on products, businesses, marketing and advertising. What we’ll be trying to do is synthesise everything down to the most pertinent issues for you. There’s lots that’s happening in this space but we want to program the topics that matter most to the digital media and marketing community so we’re delighted to be working with this group of local industry executives to shape and guide the content on Unwired Media:

Justin Baird, Senior Product Specialist, Google
Hanno Blankenstein, Director, S&C
Darren Burden, Director of News & Platforms, Fairfax Digital
John Treloar, Managing Director, ANZ, Oolaya
Oliver Weidlich, Director – Design & Innovation, Mobile Experience
Jennifer Wilson, Director, The Project Factory

Have your say on the ad:tech program. Use the comments box to suggest topics and speakers that you think would add value to the program. We look forward to hearing from you.

Read about the other advisory councils:

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