Making Content New

I spent most of yesterday at digiday:TARGET, another in a series of conferences that DM2 puts on over the course of the year. This was my fourth event, and it was especially nice to connect in person with folks I’d connected with over Twitter and the like.

The theme was, as you might guess, TARGETING…specifically, the promise of providing more relevant ads online and the ecosystem of companies emerging to help fulfill that. The day’s panels and sessions covered a number of topics – data proliferation, social media targeting, what it really means to “buy audience”, etc.

In particular, I enjoyed a late-morning panel on ad networks – interestingly enough, the, ah, interactions of a couple of the panelists showed me just how much publishers distrust exchanges. I liked the social media targeting panel as well: the participants cast more of vision for where things are headed versus where they are. Rob Key of Converseon talked about eventually being able to draw correlations between changes in online sentiment and changes in real business metrics such as sales. Probably a bit early to do this now, but once more data points exist, the thought leaders will be able to use econometrics and other advanced analytics to build causal relationships and ultimately integrate social media marketing more fully into the broader marketing mix.

As always, I liked the networking most. Digiday attracts a good conference crowd: when I was at MRM, I always felt that vendors were more interested in conversation for the sake of conversation (as opposed to for the sake of selling) than at other events. This time around, more folks stuck around for the happy hour than usual…not sure if there’s anything to take away from that, but it made for good conversation.

In thinking of what could make this an even better experience, I had a couple of thoughts:

• I like the fact that they hand everyone an attendee list upon registration, but it would be nice to know who’s coming in advance of the event itself. In particular, I’m thinking that using an Eventbrite-like tool, where you can see attendees updated in real-time, would be useful. Eventbrite is especially nice because it allows attendees to enter their website and Twitter info – this could enable conversations in advance of the conference itself. Am I crazy, or would this be useful?
• Digiday would benefit from audience participation going beyond Q&A at the end of each session. What if they crowdsourced an entire panel and discussion (both topic and participants), either prior to the event or at the event itself? Or, give the audience polling devices or a site by which they can give a quick 1-5 rating on each panel. All easier said than done, with the point being that more interactivity is a good thing.

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