Albion Society : 4 May 2011
I had another early morning at the lovely Albion Society breakfast talks. This time we had two speakers enlightening us towards the idea of ‘Hacked Advertising‘. First off was Mads Holmen, Planning Director at GoViral, a company, which had recently been bought by AOL. He emphasized on the importance of knowing how to talk to your audience, which plainly has to be agreed with. He also pointed out that advertising companies should help communities to make informed decisions. That’s surely one cheeky way of putting advertising’s role in the world, although I am not sure he was aware of the cheekiness in this statement. Then there was the idea that content is important in order to reach your audience, yet how and in what relation e.g. curated content holds against UCC, was not specified, despite the fact that this would have been an interesting discussion. I asked myself afterwards, if content creation and social tools count as content or just services, so there is a question to my readers.
On to Gustav von Sydow, CEO of Burt, our second speaker. Not lacking of self-confidence, he introduced us to the term of ‘Agile Advertising’, which shall revolutionise and make digital advertising more understandable, analysable and efficient, as for now, it is too expensive, cryptic in it’s impact and sort of just a mess (in my opinion). Burt as a company would provide the tools to change all that. Which is where his description of what and how Burt will achieve that kind of ended. The rest of the talk was a list of historical references on efficiency and processes(The Toyota Way and Mr. Ogilvy) and the mentioning of how embarrassing digital advertising’s track record is so far. To his credit, he acknowledged that noone, including himself knows how to tackle the issue and that it is not surprising that digital compared to over 100 years old print hasn’t found it’s way yet, but the talk, though entertaining, didn’t quite make a point or clarify any particular approach to the subject. I think Gustav von Sydow talks the talk, but would say he didn’t really tell us what ‘Agile Advertising’ actually is.
Anyone who was at the talk this morning is welcome to enlighten me.
So second time Albion Society. I like the venue and the events so far, even though I have to say it’s impressive to see how limited the views of the advertising community are, given that especially digital is such a vast area and I have yet have to come out of a session with a link to an amazing video or service or website or something that actually changed my view on the subject.
The common sense seems to be that no one knows what’s going on but everyone agrees that digital is an amazing opportunity to make money either off clients or themselves. This is generally not a negative side to approach things (everyone has to eat), it’s just a shame that so far the discussions are not a bit more self reflective or even philosophical. Mark Curtis did very well on that on the last Albion.
That said, the last 10 minutes of the event contained a Albion initiated wrap up of phenomena such as Culture Jammers, which is just the branch out that I usually grave for. So I will do come back next time.
No images this time, didn’t see anything visually interesting, sorry.
Ah one link http://ad-alyzer.com/ is another analytics tool for digital ads.
