I got back from the OMMA conference late last night. It was a very interesting event and it really reaffirmed for me the notion that the online advertising market is really booming regardless of recent difficulties the US economy is facing. For me it was a good opportunity to get a glimpse of the local New-York ad scene. As much as Silicon Valley is all about technology. New York is really the capital of the advertising world and only here is where you get to meet respectable top-tier agencies.
Nevertheless, it is puzzling how this landscape has changed and this conference although it wasn’t too large held an interesting mixture of agencies, direct advertisers, technology providers, search, SEM and web 2.0 applications all trying to get a sense how all of this meld really fits together (they actualy named the slogan of the conference is “Worlds Collide”). Seems like some of the interesting themes that were going on included some of the emerging monetization opportunities such as mobile, video and behavioral targeting. Another conclusion I made was that although the technology is there the agencies and the large branded advertisers are still behind on implementing some of the nextgen stuff although those that have jumped on these opportunities have found them to be very lucrative and the CPMs are really way up there.
In addition, it seems that one of issues that advertisers are facing is clearly the increasing fragmentation of content out there and that results in the need for getting more highly sophisticated in the way they can target their audience as there are so many options out there to consume content and standard demographic or geo targeting techniques dont work anymore.
One interesting angle for me that is related to what we are upto at Pudding Media is how it seems that Behavioral targeting has come along way. Although I think this is more in mind share than actual results produced to the advertisers. There seems to be a lot of activity happening in that segment. The recent acquisitions of Tacoda by AOL and Blue Lithium by Yahoo have signaled that this space is going through a stage of consolidation and this is one part of the portfolio of ad offerings those mega strategics want to provide. I recall two years when I was still working for A9, we looked at several providers and we didn’t want to touch this. Our perception of fear of breach of consumer privacy really dictated that we would stay away from these providers as they are not legit. At some point, the market turned the other direction and today tracking online user behavior by using cookie technology seems to have gained mass acceptance. The re was a lot of market education in place and today people are less concerned that their privacy is abused. So what the hell, so they caught me browsing at a Verizon Wireless site and now a week later while I am searching on the web I will be served a mobile ad. As long as none of my private Identifiable information is served to any advertisers I should be OK. Nevertheless, our position of Pudding Media is somewhat analogous to BT a couple of years ago. As our automatic system will listen in to conversations and will generate context that will be matched by relevant value and offers that will create value and the fear of breaching privacy will fade away. My point is as long as you know where to draw the line some of these things that at first seem to be intimidating might be able over time to become acceptable marketing practices as the value is proven. I strongly believe that over time people will realize the benefits that they get from targeted advertising in voice conversations and similar to long road the behavioral targeting has come along since it was outcast and ad supported calling will enter the mainstream ad market
And we will certainly be there to reap the benefits…
