I'm a bit more upbeat than yesterday. Mostly because of Nancy Hill. Nancy Hill now leads the AAAAs and many of you at OMD may remember her as she was the Account Director at BBDO on AOL. Nancy gets it. Clearly. She just joined the AAAAs a month ago, so the overall agenda (and my comments yesterday) are not a reflection on anything that she has done with the AAAAs yet.
In her keynote she focused on seeing through the 0s and 1s to see the future in the present. Over the course of the next year per Nancy,, the AAAAs communications (as agency communications should be) "Twittered, Flickered, Webcast, Podcast, and Avatared".
Nancy referred frequently to the new Aaron Sorkin play on Broadway "The Farnsworth Invention" which speaks about the man who invented the ability to send images over the air, Philo T Farnsworth, and the man who is more often given credit for creating television, David Sarnoff. Farnsworth was the technologies and Sarnoff the visionary. I believe Nancy's point is that in a world where everyone is focused on the nuts and bolts, the dashboards, the systems, the reports and modeling; it is those who take that data and don't drown in it, but create visions and successful campaigns that will be remembered (and successful in driving client business). Just to be clear, this is my take on what Nancy said, but i believe it to be a good theme.
Marc Goldstein, the CEO of Group M and head of the AAAA Media Policy Committee, then spoke. He said that perhaps the Upfront should now be referred to as the "Forward Buying Market" and that there is no doubt that the Upfront will take new forms this year due to fallout from the Writer's Strike. He highlighted the fact that we are quickly moving from a C3 standard of TV to a world where we will be able to get close to census data from set-top box data. (A point highlighted by the learnings and information that Tim Armstrong from Google brought forth during his presentation. Tim showed a chart that was created from data off of Echostar, Dish Network, set-top boxes that show that over 50% of all viewing is done on Networks with less than 1% share of viewership and 33% of all viewing is done on Networks with less than .5% share; thus illustrating that long-tail does exist in TV. I am positive that if we were to overlay ad-spending it would look far different). There is a lot of talk about addressable advertising, and it seems that with Cable initiatives, like Project Canoe, we could be significantly closer to addressability in 2009. However, as Marc warned, that will bring Media Agencies ever more into the center of the discussion of Privacy and what the boundries are. "If we don't manage Consumer Privacy responsibly and proactively, the government can take that away from us".
He touched up on multicasting. Part of the Digital transition will allow over the air networks to multicast. So, citing next year's AAAA Media Conference location New Orleans, he pointed out that the market currently has 9 over the air stations. The Digital Transition will allow each station to expand their signal into 4x as many networks; so you could potentially have 36 over the air stations; yet again increasing fragmentation.
Anne Sweeney from ABC Disney gave a polished and exciting presentation, but general consensus was that it was very much like an upfront presentation. "The one constant is the need and demand for great content". Last year there was a total of 140MM streams of full length episodes on ABC.com's player. In the first 18 weeks of the Fall Season there was 124MM streams, a 178% increase. According to Solutions Research Group, 80MM people have gone online to see their favorite TV shows and 20% make it a weekly habit.
During the last game of the NBA Finals 72% of 12-24 year olds were connecting to NBA content through various devices with a 78% unaided recall of ads.
Some insights: kids use technology to watch their favorite shows/clips over and over again. Adults use technology to catch up on things they missed.
Shortly, ABC will be adding content ratings to the opening of the streamed shows and the streamed shows will have closed captioning option.
ABC will continue to roll-out full VOD options to cable and telco operators that agree to turn off Fast Forward functionality. She did not mention if all on-air commercials will remain or if limited pods will be the model.
Finally, Tim Armstrong from Google spoke on the topic of why Google isn't out to Disintermediate the Agencies. He said that yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day after Google will not try to disintermediate the agency; but i noticed that he didn't mention three weeks from next Thursday. Hmmmm.... (Kidding)He showed off a number of tools that Google wants to build for Agencies.
The breakout sessions on research and agency integration were ok. A few of my Digital peers who sat on the Agency integration session were a bit disturbed to hear some panelists claim that certain process and procedures were issues, such as Digital Billing Discrepancies, when we tackled that issue long ago. One panelist said we don't know which numbers to go by, which is clearly not the case. Ten years ago at a AAAA Media Conference in New Orleans we negotiaited this very point with the IAB. Third Party Ad Server numbers are the basis for payment with a buffer of a 10% range in discrepancies. Should discrepancies prove to be greater than 10%, the publisher/agency has the right to investigate the cause prior to payment being made. I did have a follow up conversation with Randall Rothenberg from the AAAAs who said that the issue is that there is more often than not a 30% discrepancy. There seems to be a relatively easy fix for this. If all agencies and publishers are seeing this discrepancy with DART and Atlas, then the IAB should faciliate, with a 3rd Party neutral IT group, a test and thorough investigation to identify the cause of the discrepancy. The obvious cause is that different web server counting systems count an impression at a different point than 3rd Party Ad Servers, but there should be a concerted effort to fix this issue. If it's causing so much inefficiency on both sides and is a matter of definition or technology (like bot counting) then it should be easy to identify and come up with a solution.
Overall this was a better and more interesting day for the attendees. I did overhear one attendee making a poignant remark. This person felt that this year's conference felt like a passing of the baton from the Analog and (no offense intended) elder generation to a new young digital team.
Last posting will be over the weekend.
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