Track Sessions

There are a number of ways to use insights from search activity on your site to drive revenue. We’ll discuss how seeing what people are looking for can inform your site architecture, content layout and product selection decision. We’ll also share best practices for submitting your on-site search results to the search engines so you can have more pages included in their indices. Finally, we’ll cover practical tips for mining on-site search data to improve paid search campaign performance.

There’s a lot of buzz regarding the wealth of data available for media and marketing execs by scraping and collecting within social media, but what do I do with it once I’ve got it?  Do I use it for targeting to drive brand awareness or do I use it for increasing the qualifications of my audience and driving higher click rates and conversion rates?  To be honest, I don’t even know where to get started, so please help me!!

Online video’s a fuzzy branding medium and not a performance one, right? Not really, and that’s why eMarketer included online video among its seven Internet strategies for surviving a recession. Performance-based marketing and immediate impact is the name of the game, and marketers are winning by bringing their own video content to the Web. Thanks to democratized publishing technologies, brands are developing and extracting authentic video content that not only drives purchase intent and customer acquisition, but long-term satisfaction, loyalty and other dimensions of brand health. Who should manage it and where should it live -- on your site or across the Web? How can customers fit into the mix? How can brands leverage homegrown video with traditional advertising and branded content?

Consumer-facing brands have turned to mobile phones in the last few years to peddle their services, but Microsoft has been employing the mobile platform as a way to engage their business to business and commercial customers. Microsoft has utilized hyper-targeting on the mobile phone, mobile video communities, lead generation techniques and now a new mobile barcode technology that the company launched in January to reach these often hard-to-reach customers in meaningful and innovative ways.  McCann Worldgroup and IPG’s mobile specialist Ansible partnered with Microsoft to test these new B2B ad techniques, including the new Microsoft Tag, and will share insight and learnings from these campaigns.

Do you know how to tie a tie? Solve a Rubik’s cube? Kiss someone passionately? There’s a video for all that. In fact, that passionate kissing video alone has generated 3.8 million views on YouTube. How-to videos draw huge online audiences because everyone needs to be shown how. In most cases they’re brand-safe so advertisers are flocking to this growing genre of Web video. Venture capitalists are too and firms like General Catalyst, Spark and Tudor have recently invested in WonderHowTo.com, 5min.com and HowCast. They’re backing this genre because nearly 3% of all Internet searches are of the how-to variety. How-to videos represent an opportunity for video producers, video sites, and advertisers who want to sponsor targeted content.

With more SMS messages floating through the ether than cellular phone calls, texting is far and away the most important and available space on the mobile platform. In addition to person-to-person exchanges, billions of text alerts, novel search, and entertainment content have created a massive channel to consumers. Unlike any other placement, SMS ads have full share of voice and sit on a medium that no one ignores. Companies like 4Info, Movoxx, Limbo and Cha-Cha now offer buyers a handful of text characters on the bottom of these messages. But does the scale, attention, and brevity really add up to a worthwhile buy? SMS has everyone else’s attention, but should it deserve the attention of you and your budget yet?

In this age of transparency and authenticity, the most heated debate in the blogosphere is the merit over paying to post. To be sure, many companies have done it wrong and gotten burned, resulting in consumer backlash and tarnished brands. However, others claim there’s a right way to commercially engage bloggers and build brands. Payoffs might include online buzz, traffic, product feedback, search-engine optimization, content syndication and much more. What’s the right way to buy buzz. Is there a right way? What is paid buzz, anyway? 

As a marketer or agency, right now it is paramount for you to ensure that you are getting the most return on every marketing dollar spent. The ability of behavioral targeting to reach accurate and qualified audiences can help reduce waste and can be a valuable tool for marketers with limited budgets. Following an initial wave of M&A in 2007, the industry expected to see much more consolidation; however, the market has only become more widespread, with more and more networks, BT providers, vertical and specialized networks popping up all over. The prospects are dizzying under normal circumstances, but in today’s economy, marketers need to be able to quickly choose a partner that is the best fit for them, and get programs rolling immediately to start bringing in that revenue. A panel of representatives from a variety of BT providers answers your questions about finding the right partner for you.

Download Presentation (PPT)

How do online metrics as we know them apply, if at all, to your syndication strategy? Experts tell publishers to distribute their content everywhere and anywhere, but how do they track the basic metrics and deliver to advertisers believable numbers about audience size and quality? In a world of hyper-distribution, where page views are less relevant and uniques are harder to track, how do you value content placed elsewhere, a blog grabbing your prose, an aggregator embedding your video? And how can these metrics help your company value and monetize this expanded reach?

What metrics should I be using to evaluate my online video campaigns?  I know click rates are low, but video is more than a click, it’s about "engagement", but no-one will tell me how to measure "engagement".  This session will dive into metrics like video views, time spent, interactivity and other evaluations that you can use to determine the effectiveness of your online video campaign.

The paradox of the last decade of online innovation is that advertising has become steadily more complex, tedious and competitive. Nowhere is this more apparent than in search advertising.  To combat these challenges, a new wave of search management tools and technologies has emerged. With hundreds of thousands of complex rules and variables to manage across Google, Yahoo and other pay-per-click ad networks, tools are promising to empower search professionals to achieve better results in less time. But how do they really do that? Where’s the chasm between automation and human decision-making? How are search tools changing the game for in-house marketers versus their agencies, and big brands versus small?

Brands are excited about social media because of the medium’s promise of deeper and more meaningful engagement with consumers beyond enjoyment and usage. At the same time, social media is a minefield where tiny missteps in communication have the potential to blow up -- and not in a good way. Add to this the legal issues pertinent to legal-purchase-age products and you have ... a series of brilliant social media campaigns for Jim Beam Bourbon. Kelly Doss, senior director of Bourbons and Whiskeys for Beam Global Spirits & Wine, will explain how she got corporate buy-in to connect bloggers and Facebook users with the brand via user-generated media, while also making the legal department a strategic partner. Kelly will explain how a targeted broadcast buy kicked off an online contest with viral distribution -- and how her team keeps on top of the ever-expanding array of media channels.

Most users won’t build and maintain profiles across more than a few major social networks, so few content destinations even try building their own. Instead, content providers are struggling to find ways into Facebook and LinkedIn, Digg and the widget eco-system. But what are the proven strategies and untapped opportunities for plugging into existing social networks? Social media applications and widgets have produced uneven results. What does it take to make them work? Media sharing networks can be gamed, so how does your content get a fair hearing? And now networks like LinkedIn and Facebook offer APIs that let users bring their profile with them. How can publishers leverage this portability both on their own sites and back at the social net?

In the past, gaming usually got talked about as a really fascinating and “neat niche”, but not as a serious consideration for advertising dollars. With the numbers that have come out in the last year and the demonstration of actual performance for marketers, this is an outdated approach. The medium can finally stand on its own.  In this session we will explore various perspectives and hear the proof that gaming has come of age, from both researchers and media planners, and we’ll even hear from someone who disagrees.  Come join the debate and see whether you feel gaming has finally “come to play”.

The iPhone and its new App Store radically lowered the barriers to mobile entry for any brand. Truly rich multimedia content and easy information exchanges finally are accessible to marketers on a palatable screen. Brands can build their own applications and have a permanent presence on a user’s deck. But what have we made of this opportunity other than associating brands with the coolest technology of the past decade? Are they realizing genuine returns on these investments? Is the audience really large enough to produce meaningful CRM, direct marketing results, or even direct sales? Or is this just a really, really neat test lab for a more robust mobile future…someday? We know the iPhone is cool. But does it sell anything for anyone but Apple and AT&T?

There is lots of talk lately about cost effective "e-strategies" for budget-challenged 2009 marketers and while organic search is often touted as "free" it takes real commitment and resources to make this cost effective and long term strategy work. SEO is a critical and compelling driver of traffic and results.  As marketers search for ways to cut costs without sabotaging programs SEO can be an invaluable complement to support paid media, Social and other online programs. Our expert panel addresses cost effective strategies for budgeting for SEO/SEM and integrating other media programs with search to maximize impact. They will discuss how agencies and marketers can implement effective search programs that will build long term value for sites and still deliver ROI, right now when it is needed.

TV shows are using casual games to extend their content. Feature films are using games to tell the story between sequels. Video games are being released in episodic format. Mechanima uses games to animate video. Video is being syndicated to game consoles. As online content embraces the interactivity inherent to the online experience, the lines between watching content and playing it are being blurred. This session investigates the ways in which content can leverage gaming to extend its story, and the lessons gaming can offer traditional content producers in everything from narrative structure to business models within interactive contexts.

This session is a must for any marketer that is preaching engagement.  The term is often used and rarely defined, so lets define it.  The team of experts will debate the merits of view-through, action attribution, time spent, and other interactive measures to demonstrate how a campaign can be evaluated beyond click-through. How does a marketer truly measure performance for their efforts? 

A revealing, behind-the-scenes examination of the social media and online marketing strategies that fueled the launch of HBO’s Emmy Award-nominated television comedy series, Flight of the Conchords. Learn about the trials and tribulations of organizing social networks, communities, viewers, talent and legal departments to successfully launch a breakout season of a cult hit. Learn the secret sauce behind this campaign and the lessons that can be applied to any brand. This special case study will be presented by Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, HBO’s partner which spearheaded the campaign.

Movie studios are often the most innovative of marketers. They’ll try new mediums first and use them in innovative ways. In this case study presentation we’ll look at how Summit Entertainment and Universal used online video to market Twilight and The Unborn, respectively. Summit tapped into the passionate online fan community for the vampire romance series, offering fans the chance to stream the much-awaited trailer on their own sites an hour before it went live on the Internet. Universal crafted an eerie and incredibly scary site for its horror flick that helped that movie perform at the box office too.

Television studios and networks are sitting on a treasure trove of assets – their libraries. That’s why they’re launching Web networks to create new online ad inventory for both classic shows and movies as well as more recent programs. What’s entailed in moving your library of titles to the Web? What is working with audiences and advertisers? How do you pick and choose the films and shows and the frequency of the offering? How do you partner with other distributors and let the Web know your treasures are here? Do you need to mix in new originals for such a service to thrive? This session will cover the ins and outs of how to leverage your existing assets online and make more money from them.

Recent data suggests that mobile advertising is growing and that the iPhone is driving much of the growth (in December 2008, 46% of online ads were served to iPhones).  When will the medium reach critical mass and how much should i be allocating to mobile advertising?  How do you make and support these decision?  This session will dive into the details of how to plan and measure response in mobile so you can walk away with actionable ways of planning in the medium.

The problem with most organizations is not access to data, or a need for more data. What matters most to senior management is defining and measuring the right metrics that drive overall business performance.  Metrics must be concise, predictive, gritty, valid and consistent -- rooted in science. But they also must be simple, attainable and actionable, and that usually means less is more. It’s the difference between navigating your ship via the shortest path to success, versus fogging up your radar and plowing it into an iceberg. From an online marketing perspective, what are the right metrics to focus on and how do you measure them? How do you ensure their relevance to specific marketing goals, as well as connect them to overall business goals and brand health? Is there even one single, ultimate metric? Finally, how do you make metrics meaningful to management?

The last couple of years have been all about social media as the hottest marketing channel around, but many marketers are still unsure of how to proceed. Savvy marketers are successfully questioning the primacy of immediate ROI tactics and instead investing in their reputation and in their customer relationships by first connecting and creating value online.  The return on their efforts is something more than ROI but can also be traced to immediate leads and sales. They gave – they got.  We bring top brands together to share their recent success stories with social media, to describe how they are measuring value from the channel and how they gained internal support for the program. 

Distribute everywhere, publishers have been told for years. But no one told us how to monetize all of that social media we scattered far, wide and away from the money centers at the destination sites. Whether through RSS feed, embedded video, syndication arrangements or just a whole lot of blog links, content has gone everywhere, but the ad support hasn’t always followed. This panel engages the question of monetizing your hyper-distribution strategy. Should advertising be embedded with your content? If so, how do brands and agencies partner with content when even the publishers don’t know how and where is might show up? Is product placement an important part of the solution so that marketing messages become fully integrated with content? Is there an emerging set of business models and technologies that will incentivize syndication with real ROI? And as marketing messages follow the content anywhere and everywhere, how do markers measure and value the various exposures and interactions?

According to a recent study published by Permission TV, almost 64% of brand marketers are considering branded content and integration in online video.  That number seems to imply that marketers are more interested in integration than in standard video ad units, so is it possible that the web is going to go even further towards an integrated state?  What happens to the wall between advertising and editorial?  Do consumers even care? Studies suggest they like integration, but is that because it is still a novel idea?  This session will dive into the ups and downs and positives and negatives for media buyers considering brand integration in online video.

Search advertising delivers a solid return on investment, with full economic visibility -- important characteristics in tough economic times. But as marketers increasingly jump to performance-based strategies, accountability and profitability lies in assigning monetary value of all media contributions to goals. That includes not only a laser-like understanding of search, but search’s interplay with other formats such as display, mobile and video. Disciplined cross-channel management enables marketers to coordinate numerous campaign initiatives, while understanding the when, where and why of success. To drive efficiency and visibility into effectiveness, marketers must identify and capture the relevant metrics, while leveraging modern optimization techniques like multivariate testing -- and loop all optimization back to goal-setting. In this session, you’ll learn best practices for attribution, including: how to set up an attribution model to work towards your advertising goals; the best technologies and tools to enable tracking and acting; and the necessary skills required, either in-house or externally with your agency.

Games are a natural promotional vehicle for action films -- especially when the game itself puts the consumer into the action. Massive Inc., the in-game advertising network that can dynamically serve advertising into console and PC titles, teamed with Paramount Pictures and Ubisoft Entertainment to promote the film Tropic Thunder. They integrated a branded, interactive scavenger hunt into the game play in Ubisoft’s "Tom Clancy’s Rainbox Six: Vegas 2." Learn how to increase brand engagement by strategic design of the in-game promotion and how game designers and brand marketers can collaborate to make sure the brand message is clear, while the promotion enhances play.

Now that most major media brands have experimented with their Web presence, should they be constructing a mobile identity? How can mobility go beyond merely “extending” your content brand and actually help enhance and redefine it? The Web has been about utility, depth of information and sharing, and the smartest media companies learned to align themselves with these inherent strengths. But now many users prefer to access their news, sports, and social networking content on their phones. So what are mobile’s inherent qualities and how can media companies leverage them to align themselves with mobile?

There’s a bunch of buzz around Facebook Connect and Open Social, but whenever I read an article about them and their apparent benefit to marketers, I walk away scratching my head and more confused than when i started.  I don’t see the real applications of this to me, as a media planner. This session will provide action items for planners and marketers and show how to use these platforms for good, not evil! 

It’s a challenge – trying to be the most relevant you can possibly be. Or is it? In this special session, we will take you behind the scenes to see how common site search technology can be used in uncommon ways to drive amazing levels of relevance in email, on your website, and more. Diving beyond strategy, you will see the mechanics behind the recent Shop.org Innovation Award winning solution – where specialty footwear merchant FootWearEtc leveraged site search to power personalized product recommendations in email. The designer of the solution takes you into the retailer’s live solution to reveal how transactional, behavioral, and preference based information bolstered one retailers open rate by 250%, click-through rate by 400%, sales by 300% while decreasing opt-outs by 400%.

Something called performance-driven advertising sounds like a no-brainer in trying economic times, so what does it really mean? It can be executed in a number of ways, such as product recommendation ads, in-text links to ads and online coupons, but the combination of personalization and ability to easily track ROI is making it an attractive option for budget-challenged marketers. In addition, some industry insiders are betting on it as a way to boost ad spending in the coming years. But these technologies all rely heavily on the same principles of behavioral targeting. Our panel of performance-driven marketing companies explains the various disciplines and technologies within the field and how to get started, and brands share their real-life success with performance-driven marketing.