Notes from Ninemsn Digital Marketing Summit: Joe Pollard, Carolyn Everson, Brian Monahan
I’m at the NineMSN Digital Marketing Summit today, seeing some great presentations, trying out new products like Kinect for Xbox and Windows 7 Mobile, and catching up with a few good folk.
It’s a big production at Sydney’s Luna Park, with a great turnout from the core target community of media buyers, along with some agency and client executives. Below are a few quick notes from some of the sessions of the day.
Also see my notes from Jeffrey Cole’s excellent segment this morning, and on Dan Sheniak of Wieden + Kennedy on the future of the big idea.
Joe Pollard, CEO of Ninemsn, hosted the event, and in an interesting format shared her five top influences on the landscape one by one through the day. These are:
Scale: Communication is enabling scale of content and access.
People Power: People can make and edit news, and be brand advocates and destroyers. Ninemsn has a core value that ‘the consumer decides’.
Machine Learning: Constant learning by machines will increase capabilities on every front. Intelligent messaging will bring content to us in the formats we like, comparison engines will facilitate choice, and smart search will allow you to do tasks within the search window. Smart electronic program guides will assist us.
Human Control Panel: Our control used to the mouse, then moved on to touch, and in the future it will be our entire body and our voice. Click becomes touch becomes gesture.
Device Agnostic Content. One of the biggest challenges of the day is how to shift from a web business to a multi-platform business. It is a challenge for Ninemsn and others, but must be addressed in the years ahead.
Carolyn Everson, CVP of Global Advertising Sales and Strategy at Microsoft (and recently named in Fortune’s 40 under 40 list) points to three trends:
Real-time web. As a brand you need to see and engage with in the conversation of the moment.
Seamless experience. Content portable across devices and places, advertising moving with the content.
Natural user interface. Kinect and other gesture and body recognition interfaces will transform not just gaming but also how people engage with content and advertising.
Brian Monahan, Managing Partner of the IPG Media Lab, spoke on the future of brand influence, specifically how brands should leverage paid, owned, and earned media to influence modern buyer decision making.
Trends that Brian pointed to include:
* Increased consumption of media.
* Increased data usage on smartphones.
* More concurrent usage of media channels.
* Exposure to more media messages.
* More avoidance of advertising.
* More sources used to shape purchasing decisions
* Increased pre-shopping research.
* Product websites becoming less important.
* Increased trust in friends and family versus brands.
The freemium model allows brands to engage with consumers in an accessible way.
With the strategy at the core, brands need to:
* Innovate in paid media
* Stimulate in earned media
* Max Out in owned media
People are increasingly saying they would be happy to publicly ‘friend’ or support a brand in a social media space, notably to learn more about the product and get advance news on releases.
Examples include:
* Nike Running
* Vail Resorts Epic Mix
* Football Federation of Australia
Need to move from:
Effective frequent reach TO Attentive reach
Repetition TO Engagement
Targeted TO Relevant
Exposure TO Influence
These things can be modeled and acted upon.
Some of the best examples of earned media are from entertainment companies, because they have great content to work with, but healthcare companies are doing well too.
