The Interactive Advertising Bureau, of which YieldBuild is a member, held its annual leadership meeting earlier this week in Orlando, and I had the pleasure of attending. The tagline this year, Brands Battle Back, reflected the sentiment that agencies and publishers must fight back against the commoditization of their services to their clients, the importance of which is underscored by the dismal macroeconomic and overall industry climate.

You got the sense that the organizers picked up on some tensions between creative agencies, interactive publishers, and ad networks, as the boundaries between what each offers becomes blurrier. At the same time, the degree to which creative talent and brand understanding—agencies’ domain—and the growing influence of analytics and performance-based metrics are at odds with each other depended on who was on stage.

Recurrent themes:

• Creative is the key… Keynote speaker Wenda Harris Millard (Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s president & chair of the IAB board) put the onus on marketers to tap into their creative talent to reinvent the forms of engagement necessary to invigorate digital advertising. A press release was released as well announcing the formation of an advisory board that will inject “emotional” and “culturally significant” creative talent into premium online advertising. In a debate on the final day, Jean-Philippe Maheu, Chief Digital Officer, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, stated that agencies have and will continue to attract the best creative talent, securing their value for high-end clients.
• …but technology is critical as well. IDG’s Bob Carrigan stressed that traditional media advertising has to evolve to today’s technological reality or risk extinction. David Payne from ShortTail Media said that metrics must change to represent the value media is providing to advertisers. Terence Kawaja from GCA Savvian said that the metrics that are meaningful to marketers and publishers aren’t yet the same (marketers care about the sale, while publishers care about the size of the audience), but that presents an opportunity to create a common language. Google’s president of display advertising David Rosenblatt said that his company’s success derives from its commitment to operational efficiency and producing measurable results.
• Reducing friction. The IAB released plans to simplify the process by which ad orders are placed, tracked, and reconciled, and set up task forces to eventually set standards regarding data ownership and contracting between publishers and agencies. This is obviously an effort to reduce the complexity and time associated with moving campaigns forward simply and quickly, something successful ad networks have been doing for a few years.

One odd session featured people from the NYTimes.com team touting a 38% increase in visitors through a better digital experience. The entire time I was wondering exactly when NYTimes.com made its content free (about a year and a half ago). Let’s be honest—the NY Times has always been a newsmaker and their first-run news and exclusive feature and opinion content makes them excellent linkbait.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.