Registration Opens & Continental Breakfast Available
9:00 AM
The Real Changes Have Only Begun: Are You Well Armed?
Agencies, media, and marketers are all working quickly to adapt to a new media ecosystem that is driven by data and technology. These fundamental changes represent challenge and opportunities to everyone in the value chain. But what skills and solutions do marketers need to master this complex, daunting, but important environment? What is the view from the top? Listen in as Matt Spiegel, from Omnicom Media Group, discusses his views on what it will take to survive, to thrive, to prosper in the new tangle of ad nets.
9:45 AM
Agency Panel: Chasing the Same Audience; Chasing the Same Advertisers
As the ad networks, agencies and publishers embark on this new age of audience targeting, the lines among the participants is blurring rapidly and starting to confuse the market. Buyers and sellers, optimizers and technologies are all trying to claim audience fulfillment as their own. Publishers are building audience-centric models while agencies are trying to build their own platforms. Who is cooperating with whom and who is competing with whom? Is there a supply “chain” anymore or just all links trying to talk directly to the advertiser? Our panel of agency executives explores what this new era of audience-centric planning and buying means.
10:30 AM
The Silver Platter: Who Will Deliver Audience?
Ad networks arguably helped crown audience as “king” by providing advertisers with an efficient alternative to content-as-proxy audience accumulation strategies adapted from the offline marketing world. If the basic premise of “Audience Is King” holds true—that at least some advertisers will increasingly seek to buy targeted online audience segments as directly as possible—the question remains as to who will deliver them on a silver platter. Both agencies and publishers are taking a page from the ad network playbook, adopting new technologies and going to market with new offerings. Meanwhile, ad networks are moving fast to hone their capabilities on new inventory liquidity platforms and provide more and better service to clients. Who wins? The market will decide, but it’s worth considering what might drive the decision—technology execution, data ownership/stewardship, and where value is really being created in the emerging audience aggregation stack. View Presentation Slides
11:00 AM
Coffee Break
11:30 AM
The Great Ad Net Debate
The bickering between premium publishers and the ad network value chain doesn’t seem to be any closer to a resolution now than it was a year ago. Agencies are pressing the nets for greater transparency. Publishers either fire their networks altogether or push back against channel conflict. More recently, some publishers argue that the ad nets are ineffective channels for advertisers anyway. In this panel of publishers and Ad Nets we explore ways of moving this ball forward in this debate. Can these two parties find ways of leveraging auction-based delivery, managing guaranteed deliveries to networks, and enforcing creative standards to make the network system work better for everyone?
12:15 PM
Facing Up to Privacy: Challenge or Opportunity?
The time for hand-wringing and foot-dragging on the online privacy issue is over. Regulation and legislation are looming, and the long-promised industry self-regulation is only warming up. Something is about to be done to safeguard consumer data and identity online, but no one knows yet just what that will be. Clearly, publishers and advertisers need to learn ways of speaking with consumers, but who will own the privacy issue online? Is there actually an opportunity for digital marketers to enhance their relationships with consumers by engaging the issue more frankly? Where is the self-regulatory plan and what will it require of the value chain? As time runs out for debate over the issue, we opt-into what online privacy may look like in 2010.
1:00 PM
Lunch
2:00 PM
An Emerging Display Ecosystem
When Google enters the display market in a big way, everyone takes notice. One of the most important events this season in the ad network space is the launch of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and its real-time bidding on a massive pool of publishers and inventory in Google’s stable of partners. How does Google view this new ad environment that is coalescing around exchanges? What tools are needed to make display ad buying and selling easier for the entire value chain? And how does this new ad exchange affect the networks and publishers it brings together? The Group Product Manager for Google’s new exchange tells us how the world’s largest search company is now viewing display. View Presentation Slides
2:30 PM
Detangling the Nets: Can Anyone Simplify “The Stack?”
The “stack” of technologies now at play in well-targeted and well-optimized ad campaigns has become daunting. In just the last year we have seen new layers pile on: network and data exchanges, sell side and now buy side optimizers, social media targeting products all promise greater campaign efficiencies. Many buyers complain that they need advanced technology degrees just to understand the components that are supposed to deliver on the digital promise. Each layer of “efficiency” adds more cost and complexity to the process. Is this any way to run an ad environment? What are the Ad Nets doing to make the process of buying to advanced targeting and optimization technologies more palatable and streamlined? We bring buyers and sellers together on this panel to hash out a game plan.
3:15 PM
Coffee Break
3:30 PM
Vetting the Data: Which Targeting Points Get You Closest to Your Audience and Your Goals?
Data, data everywhere, but from which bucket do you drink? The social graph, purchasing histories, behavioral histories, intent-based re-targeting - so many new data points to consider, so little clarity. How can marketers map these new data points and targeting options against the audience they seek and the campaign goals they need to hit? Which kind of data is most important to specific campaigns? This panel brings together academics, buyers and technology companies to explore what data marketers need, how to set expectations for advertisers, and how networks, technology companies and advertisers can get a better understanding of how to speak the same language in a field that reinvents itself regularly.
4:15 PM
Is the Long Tail Wagging? Have the Vertical Networks Lived Up to Their Own Hype?
We end OMMA Ad Nets with a super-sized industry jam session taking on the question of vertical ad networks from across the long value chain. Whatever happened to those 400 Ad Nets of a year ago, each serving every imaginable niche? From casual gamers to high income “affluentials,” auto buyers to tech geeks, gourmands to active athletes, everyone has a network. These nets once promised buyers not only superior targeting of specialized audience but also touted their better service, expert knowledge of audience, and deeper ad integration with member sites than marketers could get from the big horizontals? Has there been a shakeout in the last year and what have we learned about what it takes for niche nets to survive and thrive moving forward?
