Joe Apprendi, CEO, Collective Media thinks we should keep our eye on the ball and that ball is the Brand. Then overlaying data on brand ecosystem including the advertising inventories held by many sources. Finally, review the results to determine - where – the ad is to appear.
He thinks conflict in the channel can be avoided by publishers dealing with the same advertising inventory sources by thinking more consumer-centric and less website centric. By understanding more about the consumer, data will be better segregated into what works for each publisher – the more targeted the less opportunity for publishers to crash into each other because the consumer universe becomes smaller.
Tim Hanlon, Executive Vice President/Managing Director, VivaKi Ventures says that data is perhaps one of the biggest issues at VivaKi because Publicis creative agencies are early in their schooling on the sophisticated approaches to analyzing data given all the new tools and technologies. He sees brand and direct marketing collapsing into a unified approach to connect with the consumer and allowing them to go deeper into the understanding of the brand and the product.
At the same time, Tim has a pulse on where the industry is taking the lead with regards to regulation. He thinks there will be more industry regulation because of ethical challenges around personal information.
Since marketers hang back, not wanting to be first to adopt new technologies as channels that could diminish a client’s brand through ethical breaches more so than technological glitches, I see a doorway opening for technology companies to organically growing their own marketing and advertising divisions such as Nokia, HP, EBay, and many other peer and smaller techs. Because techs have long had to deal with intellectual property and ethics in communications at all layers of the IP stack, they are more likely than advertising agencies to drive forward the parameters for regulation of personal privacy that advertisers will adopt.
Alan Chapell, President, Chapell & Associates deals with the legal issues around data and the trail. Who owns the data and what rights do they have? It is a public policy issue and Intellectual Property issue. Do the advertisers own it? Does the consumer own their own IP? Or, does it belong to the technology layers that transport the data?
Finally, David Honig, Co-Founder, Media6˚, took a look social data as a reflection of people rather than content to grow the community around a product or service. Social community allows for targeting that can grow audiences by finding like minds. This is important so that in this era where consumers are acquirers of tremendous information and want to learn new things, new products, new ideas, and new services are not given the same ads over and over again to the point of annoyance. By using social media data research and finding like minds, the consumer will receive new information, new advertisements around what their interested in, not just what ads they previously clicked on or what news and entertainment websites they visited.
Publishers are starting to take advantage of data available, but there not yet there, and will probably take advantage of partnerships to learn their way into using the data from say… social meeting sites around… sports cars.
