The three diverse sessions will offer an opportunity to showcase some of our agency’s unique culture and thinking. Our folks will cover the communication tactics involved with politics, Hispanics and gay and lesbian issues.

The schedule of presentations are:

• Dino Hainline: “Perfect Timing: Evolving GLBT Suicide Prevention,” Friday, 2-3 p.m. at the Austin Convention Center room 10AB. Before “It Gets Better” there was a Trevor Project, an initiative that worked to curb GLBT suicide.
• Jose Villa: “Hispanic Persona Project,” Sunday, March 11, 9:30-10:30 a.m. at the Austin Convention Center room 10AB. The Hispanic Persona Project provides innovative insights for marketers eager to tap the ever-expanding Hispanic population and its use of digital technology.
• Danny Allen: “New Media Strategies & Insights for Election 2012,” Sunday, March 11, 5-6 p.m. at the AT&T Conference Hotel, Salon B. Danny will be part of a panel discussing the tools that will help shape this year’s presidential campaign.

This offer was attractive to me for 2 reasons:

1. I have a really bad habit of losing receipts – they end up the trash, fall out of my pocket/shopping bag, or just generally disappear. Having the receipt emailed to me helps me avoid losing it.
2. I am always looking to digitize my life and avoiding paper for digital alternatives. Getting a receipt emailed to me aligns perfectly with my general digital preference.

Later that day, I received an email from Nordstrom.com welcoming me as a new registrant on their site.

I was very impressed with the entire experience.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been asked for your email by countless retailers at checkout. I never give them my email, because there is nothing in it for me.

Nordstrom instead offered me value in exchange for my email address (i.e. a digital copy of my receipt).

I may never buy anything on Nordstrom.com online, but they now have my email in their database and made created a positive shopping experience. Most importantly, they effectively connected my in-store experience and purchase with their digital platform (Nordstrom.com). I will definitely shop there again, and who knows, I might be something from them online. All because they offered me a digital receipt.

Nordstrom gets it.

The first was a report from Forrester projecting interactive marketing spend in 2016, which they estimate will reach $77 billion. While the headline focused on the fact that interactive media will catch-up to television media spend by that date, an equally interesting set of figures provide a glimpse into a very different digital media world in 4 years. The report predicts that search’s share of digital media spend will shrink, as marketers disproportionately increase their investments in more sophisticated display media and really rev up their mobile media spend.

The second was an AdAge Digital piece on how veteran digital shops (most of which started in the late 90′s) were changing (and expanding) their business models. The article focused on the big search agencies – iCrossing, 360i, and iProspect – and how they’re diversifying into other areas of digital advertising. Obviously they’re looking at the same data as Forrester, and as they look to grow, they are seeing greener pastures in areas such as digital content, display advertising, and online video.

The article also talks about how shops like AKQA are expanding their focus from digital design and development into digital media (search, display, etc).

Two trends I see for the future:

• Less room for and a resulting fewer number of specialist digital shops (i.e. the search marketing agencies, or the digital content shops)
• The growing prominence of a new breed of large, integrated digital agencies, accentuated by an increased difficulty for big traditional agencies to keep up with the pace of change in digital

FastCompany.com has a nice story on the new platform coming out next week called Online Campaign Ratings, or OCR for short.

In one sense, OCR sounds like a major improvement over the Nielsen box, a measurement tool I have always questioned (BTW, how many people do you know with a Nielsen box? How about people using Facebook?). There is no doubt that adding demographic data to digital media planning and tracking tools will be extremely valuable. And yes, translating the Web measurement into a metric that “old school” media planners understand will likely help move some small amount of large branding media budgets from TV to the Web (specifically digital video).

However, the folks over at Digiday are asking if applying a traditional media measurement tool is actually a good thing for the world of digital media? This is a very valid question, and one I think about a lot. Specifically, is the GRP the best way to measure media reach, or the best available tool to measure traditional media at the time it was developed?

The question we need to be asking is whether the online GRP, or OCR in this case, will make digital media planning more effective for advertisers and improve the business of digital publishing?

Today I noticed a lot of industry Facebook friends “friending” an ad agency’s Facebook page, so I checked it out. I clicked on their Website link and “poof”!… I was greeted by a splash page that took 5 seconds to load, served up a Flash-based 2 second animation, and then took another couple of seconds to redirect me to their main Website.

I just don’t get it… why are companies, particularly my colleagues at ad agencies, so fascinated and obsessed with splash pages. They’re annoying, they’re dated, and worst of all, they force users to have to “consume” some usually uselesss, disjointed animation illustrating how cool they are. If your animation was so cool, or interesting, why not give site visitors the option to view it on their own. Why force them?

Also, why give visitors, who are usually looking to learn about the agency, a reason to leave before they get to the real site?

Again, maybe I’m off here, but does anything see things differently?

In the article, Shar refers to another recent Forrester report that boldly recommends that companies should reduce their paid ad budgets by 10%, investing those resources in customer engagement – in the form of owned media like content, apps and earned media such as social media programs / outreach.

I think this is right on and a great starting point for companies and marketers looking to evolve with the changing media and consumer landscape. I firmly believe that companies should be moving away from an emphasis on paid media (which is generally “one-way” in nature) to owned and earned media. However, I am not naive and realize that it will take time to shift organizations used to doing things a certain way for a long time (i.e. focusing on big paid ad campaigns) to shift to a more balanced model where owned and earned media are equals at the table.

In many ways, for this to happen, companies need to begin evolving their marketing departments and those working in them. As I regularly tell our clients who work in marketing, they are increasingly in the content business. Creating content (and managing communities, etc.) requires very different skillsets than writing marketing briefs, reviewing ad copy and approving media plans.

Revolutionary change doesn’t happen overnight, particularly at large corporations. But change in 10% increments is a great starting point for the type of evolution that is necessary within marketing organizations.

More specifically, the conference is centered around the idea of a new discipline and role at advertising agencies –  the “Creative Technologist.” The Creative Technologist appears to be a hybrid of a developer/programmer/CTO and a designer/Creative Director.

Is the 4A’s ahead of a trend coming to the ad business? Or is this a futile path towards creating more silos within ad agencies? Maybe this is just a lot of hype from big agencies and their trade group trying to “catch up” and stay relevant in a quickly changing digital world?

What do you think?

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THE 4A’S TO HOST ADVERTISING INDUSTRY’S FIRST CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY (“CREATETECH”) CONFERENCE

The advertising industry is no longer solely devoted to making advertising. Transformative ideas—with technology as an integral component—are changing the way to do business. And a broad group of minds—the creative technologists—are facilitating these changes. The 4A’s, in launching the industry’s first creative technology conference, “CreateTech,” is acknowledging the confluence of creative and technology, and the critical role played by creative technologists in the current advertising landscape.

“CreateTech,” a one-day conference to be held Friday, May 20 (8:30am-5:30pm), at the Sentry Midtown Conference Center (730 Third Avenue, New York), will explore the challenges facing creative technologists, bring together prominent practitioners currently working in the agency world, and establish an ongoing community of engagement in these issues. The inaugural conference will highlight client/agency collaboration from a technology perspective, explore some emerging marketing technologies and celebrate an increasingly important community in advertising.

The 4A’s is also establishing a new Creative Technology Committee to further the work of the conference with agencies and clients. The committee will be co-chaired by Scott Prindle, SVP, Executive Technology Director, CP+B and Trevor O’Brien, Creative Technology Director, McKinney.

Featured speakers include, J. P. Rangaswammi, Chief Scientist, Salesforce.com; Scott Roen, Vice President, Marketing, American Express; Glen Fellman, Group Creative Director and Trevor O’Brien, McKinney; Gary Koelling, Director of Emerging Platforms at Best Buy; Marcel Kornblum, Creative Technologist,  Stink Digital; Brian Skahan, VP/Creative Technology Director, Crispin Porter + Bogusky; Nick Parish, North American Editor at Contagious Magazine and Nancy Hill, President-CEO, 4A’s.

Select session topics include: “Agency Technology/Creative Methodologies and Technique”; “Technology/Creative Collaboration and Team Organization”; “Technology, Common Ground: Brands, Agencies, Specialists, Entrepreneurs”, “Digital Retail” and “Emerging Capabilities: APIs, Augmented Reality and more.”

“Establishing a conference like ‘CreateTech’ will bring together the senior managing digital technology community in one place,” said Chick Foxgrover, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer.   “There are brilliant innovative thinkers in agencies today and we are eager for them to participate, contribute and connect.’”

He basically identified 6 criteria that can let a client know if an ad agency is for real when they say they do digital:

• They have a track record of active participation in digital conferences (such as SXSW, OMMA, and Ad:Tech)
• They have director-level or higher technology leader on staff (not an IT guy)
• They have full-time, in-house development resources (front-end and back-end developers on staff, not outsourced)
• They have digital-only clients or large Website development projects under their belt
• In addition to Account Planners, they have the digital equivalent, such as User Experience leads
• They have analytics staff (dedicated) and have invested in marketing analytics software tools

I whole-heartedly agree with Mr. Wiener’s assessment, and would take it a step further. True digital advertising capabilities require:

• In-house digital creative production capabilities (e.g. Flash programmers)
• Information Architecture and/or Content Strategy disciplines within their agency
• Client social media program expertise (concepting, developing and managing social media initiatives for clients) – and no, creating a Facebook page doesn’t cut it.

I could make a longer, more detailed list of capabilities I feel are critical to truly be digital, but I think these cover it broadly.