the next big thing

I went to the adtech Sydney – it was a 2 day conference on digital advertising – where we are now and were to. I’ve got a few pages of notes, I’m not going to refer to in preference of giving my over all impressions.

Basically the sessions got me thinking – a good thing (some might say), as ideas are what makes me get inspired (the food was quite uninspiring though).

A really interesting point (from Nick Brien’s talk) got the brain firing – the idea that crisis situations (really economic crisis here) brings about innovation, generates new ideas – a ripe time for invention out of necessity is upon us! The pressure must really make us get creative. So rather than see doom and gloom we could be asking ourselves what opportunities are available now. It’s a new market with new needs. Where there’s gaps there’s new money to be made (and there’s a lot more gaps because the landscape has changed so much, so the old is less likely to work in the same way).

What else? Well a large part of the conference discussed the emergence of social media as a powerful platform tipping the relevance of traditional media. Everyone that took this line was careful not to discount traditional media, but generally speaking a big billboard or a TVC alone just won’t have the same influence it once did. It’s about trust, Sharyn Smith from Soup put it something like: without too much thought, we’d buy that detergent our mum recommends but we’d need a lot more convincing if a recommendation comes from a brand.

Case in point – my wife did her internet research for a stroller, blog after blog after forum, wiki etc etc she found the perfect stroller (a lot of mum’s liked it). She hardly looked at the actual sites that offered the product she was interested in. So apparently the destination page is really not that important after all. The deeper point is that products and campaigns need to stand up to our ever demanding need and ability to recognize the authentic, human element – if it can’t stand up to this, it’s likely to fall especially in this demanding economy.

One last point, web 2.0 is dying so welcome mobile / portable / social web 3.0 – mix it with social media that better mimics our psychosocial behaviors and there exists the next big thing.