By Alison Readings, Renegade Media
As the day progresses our speakers have made some pertinant points that have really supercharged my mind. Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo! talked to us about creative display advertising and its importance. Whilst listening to the case studies of successful and creative campaigns that Yahoo! has run, it struck me that creative display advertising is actually ‘social’advertising.
Each of the campaigns Carol discussed, including those for Shell and Nestle each had an element of social networking. Making the most of the creative canvas online Carol says, is about linking with people’s emotions.
Empowering people, no matter how they’re connected to engage with the information and ultimately to share it, via social media or to coin another term ‘social recommendation optimisation’. This rings true with the point Aleks Krotoski made that 43% of hits on CNN was through social networks Facebook etc. If people feel emotionally attached enough, they will engage with and share the information they want. I definitely agree, I do it often enough.
Scott Seaborn from Ogilvy UK chatted through his work with mobile technology. According to Scott, in 2020 our phones will have ‘hyper’ conversations with our table for example, and our table will talk to our PC to automatically feed us with information we need and update our social networks automatically. Personally I think this is quite a scary thought, with everything ‘talking’ around me, can I ever just be me again? Maybe this is the future. If an augmented reality app can cover everything I see through my phone in snow then why not.
President of Microsoft’s online services division, Dr Qui Lu argued that today’s consumer-facing internet is a “topical Internet” thanks to the “connective tissue of the web” are based around hyperlinks. He added that “keywords are nothing more than “a topical expression of what we want” and that the velocity of change in digital is increasingly in real time. Of course everyone knows you can find out about something that is happening right now just by a few clicks of the mouse, after all I’m blogging this as it happens. But what really matters to us are our friends opinions. That’s real influence. The recent Facebook and Bing tie up meaning our peers attitudes will appear in search listings is quite profound, for the first time it means ‘trusted opinion’ will influence our decision making. That sounds like the future to me.
Carol Bartz speaking at IAB Engage 2010 'Supercharge Your Brand'
