Adotas

Where media buyers start online

Featured Author

Sarah Novotny is a contributing editor at Adotas. Sarah grew up in San Jose, California. Her educational and professional career have taken her to both Los Angeles and New York City where she received a B.F.A. from NYU. As a writer, Sarah has free-lanced for various publications focusing primarily on traditional advertising and media reviews. When not writing and editing for Adotas, Sarah is continuing her acting career in various theatrical and film/television productions.

More articles by Sarah Novotny





Features

ad:tech New York 2006: The Interactive Industry’s Finest Invade the Big Apple

Written on
Nov 7, 2006 
Author
Sarah Novotny  |
Share
ad:tech New York 2006: The Interactive Industry’s Finest Invade the Big Apple

Since it’s in occurring in so many cities now, how do you gauge what coverage belongs where?

There are two answers to that question. One, part of the answer is that the regional ad:tech brand, and let’s just talk about the United States—San Francisco, Chicago, and New York—they’ve developed little bits of personality and positioning on their own, just because of where they are. With the San Francisco show, and I’m born and raised in the Bay area, I think it’s fine, it’s always had a little bit more of a West coast technology feel. That makes sense. New York is New York. It’s the big show, the flagship, and a little more focused on traditional media, brands and things like that. Chicago is like Chicago is, it’s a traditional advertising and media town. It’s a little smaller, and not quite as well-assembled as the others. But you’re going to see a solid show.

I think that’s the smart thing to do. I wouldn’t want a cookie-cutter ad:tech in regards to how we approach the three shows in the United States. I think they all have a basic underpinning that is ad:tech in all of them, but they also need to be tailored to where they are. I think that’s already happening now. Having said that, there’s a larger issue with ad:tech in recent years. Basically, it’s been so focused on survival, and justifiably so. But it really hasn’t taken the time to brand itself. If you think about it, never have you probably seen, other than when it’s conference time and you get your email for ad:tech, there isn’t really a larger strategic branding initiative that’s gone on. What do we think ad:tech is?

You’ll get variations on answers, but if you don’t brand yourself, your market will brand yourself for you. There are a lot of different perceptions I’ve heard in the marketplace. Most of which I don’t really think are true. If you peek into the attendee list, and look at the calendar of speakers, ad:tech is still large in this game, and remains pretty high-caliber, and that’s critical. I’m not on this mission to try to get the highest EVP or SVP or C-levels of all major brands and agencies. I don’t think that’s realistic. But we still have to remain very relevant to that key senior manager, VP level, that are making the decisions and are out there, the strategic level decision makers as well as to the AE’s and junior media planners and buyers, and people who are doing a lot of the executions. I think we can keep that range, if you will. It is a pretty broad range when you dive into the attendee list.

But I think we need to take the time tell all of these people, whether it’s the C-level or junior media planner, what ad:tech is—this is what we stand for, here’s our position, and take it from there. I don’t think we need to move, from a positioning standpoint, ad:tech in a big way. It doesn’t require this fundamental repositioning, unless we could tweak it a little bit. It’s as much about tweaking and taking the time to brand yourself as it is about simply evolving with the market. We have to evolve the marketplace. As everybody knows, more so me because I’m responsible for making sure that we’re talking about things that are relevant to everybody, it’s just difficult to stay on top of everything.

It seems like a lofty post.

But it takes a lot of focus and energy, and if you do lose your focus, you’re going to put together a conference that really isn’t that relevant. As big as these things are, all it takes is one poorly programmed conference to throw it off its tracks. My only point there is it’s really difficult for all of us. I’m an analyst by trade, and I have a hard time staying on top of things. A year ago, nobody knew who MySpace or YouTube was, and here they, second or third-ranked in traffic.

That seems to be a common trend in this industry.

We weren’t talking about search 4 or 5 years ago, really, and here it is, it’s 40% of the total business, an industry that basically went from $0 to $5, $6 or $7 billion in four years. It’s crazy. It’s not so much the change. Change is fundamental, and that’s scary enough. We can, should, and are certainly using that to our advantage. We never have the time to read as many of the magazines, e-zines and newsletters to stay on top of educating ourselves about the business, so the advantage of the marketplace that is ad:tech is we’re a place you can come take a break for a few days and catch up—what is going on, what are your competitors doing, what are your peers doing, what other brands doing, case studies and best practices that are emerging.

You can feel like you came away and you’ve learned something. You can go back and feel current, up-to-date and there are a few things you can take back as action items. As long as we keep doing that, then we’ll be successful.





Reader Comments.

No comments yet

Leave a Comment

Add a comment

Pages: « previous page 1 2 3

Tags: , and
Article Sponsor

More Features


  • Once Facebook goes public, what's the most important thing it'll need to do in order to live up the expectations of its real value?

    View Results

    Loading ... Loading ...

Latest News

News Archive

Spotlight

Sponsormob Leads the Way Into RTB for MobileADOTAS – For more than half a decade, Berlin-based tech firm Sponsormob has remained relevant in an industry characterized by [...] more...

Adotas Partnership