Future of Online Advertising Highlights (FOOA 2007)

I was in NYC Thursday and Friday for the Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference held at beautiful Gotham Hall. The event, the first of what will probably many conferences on this emerging topic, has sparked enough buzz to get Mayor Bloomberg to officially declare this week “Online Advertising Week.” I attended for free, thanks to Darren Rowse of Problogger.net who gave away tickets on his blog a few weeks back and I happened to be one of the winners.

Sadly, my digital camera chose Thursday to malfunction on me, so I only have low resolution pictures from my camera phone. That said, you can check out photos of the event on Flickr.

Anyway, aside from spotty wi-fi coverage, FOOA was extremely well run and informative. Ryan Carlsen, Director of Carlsen Systems, put together an incredibly informative lineup and kept things on schedule throughout the two day event – quite an impressive feat given the back-to-back speakers.

Throughout the many speakers’ talks, a few themes kept emerging, including:

• It’s harder than ever to reach consumers through advertising. First, there’s the problem of where to reach them with the ever growing number of marketing channels. Then, there’s the problem of how to reach them when virtually all consume content in bite sized chunks while doing other tasks. Something like 75% of people say they surf the web while watching tv. How can you get their undivided attention?
• Advertisers stink (and must get better) at testing their ads and measuring results
• The most promising forms of advertising are coming from social media campaigns and online video. Other potentials include reaching the long tail, niche bloggers through ad networks and RSS advertising.
• Advertisers need to stop “interrupting” website browsers. Instead, they need to go where their audience is and join the conversation, whatever that may be. In other words, it’s no longer about the advertisers having all the control. Now your audience has control of all content they consume.
• There’s a great deal of speculation about where the future of interactive advertising is heading – especially with privacy concerns and ads becoming more intrusive. We’ve learned that a number of things aren’t working – like 15 sec ads running before video content (called pre-roll). We also know that most people don’t like intrusive ads mixed with their content, so what will work in the future?

For more detailed overviews of speakers’ talks, here are the summaries + my thoughts:

• Greg Stuart on Measuring Advertising ROI
• Ron Belanger on Understanding Consumer 2.0
• Kim Malone on Google Adsense Pricing Models
• Ways to Monetize Your Blog

So much was covered. I have like 25 pages of notes! I’ll be adding more highlights as I finish the write ups.

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