The Best of 2012's IAB Annual Leadership Meeting

To those who attended the IAB’s annual leadership meeting last week, the future of digital advertising looked quite bright indeed…but also more complicated than ever. The spectrum of formal topics ranged from predictions to new creative formats to advertising technologies to legislation. Off the floor, the two recurring conversations I heard revolved around ad management and online video.

Since the meeting kicked off on the same day as the Oscars and since you can read and watch highlights of the event on the IAB website, I thought I’d have a little fun and deliver my key takeaways Academy Award style.

Best MC

IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg once again proved why he’s the right person to be helming the organization. Entertaining and gracious, he set the tone for the event. But he also set forth an impassioned entreaty for members to get involved, particularly with respect to matters of government legislation that will affect the entire industry. “What you don’t know, can hurt you and can kill your company,” Rothenberg warned.

Best Buzzword

I would love to say that it was the event’s Twitter hashtag (#IABALM, which reminded me more of ChapStick than anything else), but sadly I think it was weakly used at best. Instead, the word on everyone’s lips was engagement. “Advertising has the ability to convert attention into brand engagement and sales transactions,” reminded author and advisor Geoffrey Moore; “Reach is no longer enough – we must have the ability to have meaningful engagement with our consumers,” informed Peter Moore, COO, Electronic Arts; “It’s all about the content – let users choose their engagement,” urged Karim Temsamani, Google’s VP new products and solutions, to cite a few.

Best Cool New Ad

The IAB showcased examples of the six new large-format, brand-friendly “Rising Stars” rich media display ad units. While they all demonstrated creativity and the expanded capabilities of these ad formats, my personal favorite was AKQA’s use of the Portrait format to do live cam fundraising for Pencils of Promise.

Juiciest Quotes

There were a few I liked:

“Everyone’s a marketer.” – Susan Jurevics, Sony’s senior vice president of global retail CRM and brand marketing

“For clients, Facebook is becoming the Internet – and for brand marketers, Facebook is the black hole of marketing – why aren’t there Facebook specialty agencies?” – Tom Bedecarré, CEO, AKQA

“We need to solve the problem that it’s easier to execute a seven-figure television buy than a $10K digital test.” – Bill Wise, CEO, MediaOcean

Best Controversy

Day 3 featured ” Ad Technology in the Hot Seat ” where five ad technology CEOs had three minutes to answer four core questions, explaining what they did and then taking hard-hitting questions from the audience (including how many of these tech companies were actually profitable). But in the session that followed, when the first speaker, Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, asked the audience if anyone understood what any of the five previous panelists’ companies really did and if you could differentiate any of them from each other, virtually no one raised their hand. Case in point: ad technology is too complicated and if it can’t be made simpler and if no one gets the value proposition in using these technologies, they’re not going to succeed or find allies in the major players in the digital advertising ecosystem.

Best Surprise Session

The end of Day 2 closed with a panel of Chinese ad industry senior executives. We had to listen through headsets as a translator relayed most of the presentation, just like we were at the U.N.! It was fascinating to observe the similarities and differences in China’s nascent online media ad industry compared with the early days of our own. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Top Takeaways

Here’s my ear-to-the-ground list:

• A change in digital ad tracking is a-coming, whether it will be legislated or self-imposed
• We can expect the push for placing more digital video ads to continue (based on the number of sidebar sales meetings and pitches that I heard and witnessed)
• The added volume of content being created each day presents a challenge to all sides of the digital equation…and along with that, opportunities to manage and monetize it
• Data is daunting – all parties are collecting, analyzing and utilizing, and storing vast amounts of consumer data with little end in sight
• Everyone needs more and constant education – from media planners up to CEOs, we all have to keep ourselves informed