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Hey Guys,

LehmanMillet sent me to ad:tech on Thursday which was held at the Moscone Center up in San Francisco. It was great, and what follows below is a shortened version of what I learned there which you might find interesting.


SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
-Blogs: every company should have one to have a voice in the conversation about their products and services. The conversation about a company's products and services is already happening on the internet and a blog is a great opportunity for a company to have a voice in that conversation. Bruce Clay said for companies that a blog is an essential part of protecting the brand.
-Ranking in Search Engines: Sometimes it is better to host all of the content for a particular keyword on same page to achieve a higher rank in the search results, which might lead to more traffic.
-Website Logins: A company shouldn't put product content behind a form or a login that they want a search engine to search because it blocks the search engines from reading it.

Google
-Algorithms: Google has these huge secret formulas, called Algorithms, which weigh hundreds of factors that cause a search in Google to return a certain result and these formula's are constantly changing. For example, Google made over 450 changes to the formula last year (that's more changes then days there are in a year!) this would explain why certain keywords can easily change positions among many other factors.
-Universal Search: Google and the other search engines are headed to what is called a Universal Search, what this basically means is that when a person searches something on Google the they will also search their other search sites such as images, maps, videos, and news stories and then present that information on what is called a Blended search page. (You can see an example of a blended search here). As a result people and companies that are trying to rank well in the search results for a certain keyword should be thinking about how to submit content for each of these search sites so that they have a higher chance of appearing on the front page of a Google search result.

YouTube
-Videos with Ad Overlays: YouTube is now offering Google AdSense ad overlays on certain videos which allows a lot of user interactivity. These ads may link to a advertisers product or service landing page or to a YouTube Branding Channel
-Branding Channels: YouTube demonstrated their new Branding Channels which are based around a certain brand to create a larger amount of brand awareness for that product or service. The example they gave was for an ingenious Post It Note campaign which allows users to submit videos on YouTube about how they use their post it notes. The winning Post It Note submission will get a $10,000 prize.


Widgets
-Reaching Audience: Widgets are little things that people can put on their site to provide their users with interactivity and or to link to another site. They allow authors to reach their audience where they are hanging out on the web.
-Widget Ads: It seems that the direction that online ads will be going is that the users may want to have options within their ads, such as differing links to click on within banner ads rather than a single banner ad that links to the same landing page. In addition to this widget ads are going to become more interactive allowing users to interact with an ad on the existing site without having to go to an advertisers landing page. Be on the look out for these types of widgets at a website near you.

Email Marketing
-Effectiveness: Email Marketing can be effective if it isn't done too frequently and if it directly targets something that an individual user would find relevant to their needs. For example if a company knows a customer's favorite flavor of ice cream than it makes more sense to send them coupons for that flavor of ice cream, email marketing will become even more personalized. In addition email campaigns that are "opt-in" are much more effective than any other type of email campaign where companies buy email lists, etc because when a user commits to an email list it probably means that they want to read those emails.
-Localized Email Content: The more localized an email blast is the better. An email may be sent out to a million people but if it doesn't have relevant information for different users in different locations it is useless. Therefore there is now amazing email technology out that can send out lots of emails at the same time to millions of different users with information that populates uniquely for each individual recipient of that email depending on what a company knows about a customer. For example, HP will remember what type of printer you buy from them and will send out reminders to a million people to buy ink cartridges with each person receiving exactly the right ink cartridge for their particular printer, it is no coincidence that they make most of their revenue from selling ink cartridges.



In conclusion, the conference was really inspiring with what is possible with interactive advertising, it provides many opportunities for advertisers to be much more conversational with the community of customers that they are reaching out to and the customer has more say with how they are reached than ever before. These are exiting times that are upon us, watch out for new and innovative ways to reach your audience!

Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions.

Best,
-Mike Morabito