Advertising Thought Leaders Technology Forecast 2009

Last night MITEF hosted a dinner program where thought leaders in advertising and technology shared their views on how the future of advertising will be shaped by technology.  The evening's program concluded with the panelists providing a succinct forecast for 2009 and beyond. You can view the following short video clip to hear their predictions:

Other top takeaways included:

• The winners will be brands that are willing to give up some degree of control to the customers they serve and want to engage.

• Consumers no longer wait for news therefore technology deliver advertising to consumers at the same moment news is breaking

• Tapping local advertiser dollars online: technology must evolve to capture local advertisers. Of 20MM local advertisers in the US; only 1MM advertise online.

• Metrics must evolve to from clicks to measuring actions: Did this action result in furthering the transaction. A local Seattle start-up, Visible Technologies, is one of the companies making progress in this area.

• Focus on prioritizing value not technology: brand strategy and attributes should drive the technology and media selected and should align with the brand values.

• As consumers have more access to information, advertising must be relevant and authentic. Personalization and profiling is key.

• Mobile offers 16BB untapped ad units (i.e. # of calls made per day) and will be monetized. This compares to 11BB ad units served per month by Google.

• Saavy users requires authenticity: 65% of teens have created and/or uploaded content to the Web therefore brands have to be authentic.

• Give consumers an experience that they will remember: When designing your website, don't ask yourself what cool new technology we can deploy, but rather, what is the experience you want your customer to have and remember. The experience that is consistent with the brand wins the customer.

• Get people to stop saying no to advertising: Behavioral advertising boasts that their ads see an 8x improvement in click thrus as compared to traditional display ads. While impressive, displays ads only see a .01% of traffic click through so in essence behavioral advertising realizes a .08% average CTR. That's a lot of people saying "no" to the advertising and this can only be improved through relevance. Technology that can aggregate geo, profile, timeliness, preferences and permission will win consumers.

• Branding is about doing a few things -- and being recognized for it-- really, really well. Get your customers and employees to be your story tellers and be ready to engage.