Held at the Renaissance Hotel, Hollywood March 17-18th the conference geared toward marketing and advertising for online content and services offered a near overload of information in the form of "Breakout Sessions" that were held throughout the 2 days simultaneously in 4 different designated rooms. Sessions were broken down into categories of Online Content, Media, Marketing, and Advertising and had titles such as Social Media and The Coveted Communities That Lie Beneath, Targeting in Online Video: Finding Audiences And Advertisers in All This Video, How To Buy Video and Look Smart Doing It and Getting Mobile Out of the Silo. "Silo" was one of the buzz words used frequently at the conference by the ad crowd to denote non-integrated services or apps. Heard more than once from attendees was the comment that ad agencies are still very silo'd, "they talk about being integrated but aren't."
Highlights: Picnik http://www.picnik.com which is an online photo editor. Voted Best of The Web for 2007 (co-honorees were Google and Amazon), this online app is for everyone who doesn't have PhotoShop as part of their software suite. Monica Harrington, Picnik's Marketing Guru, called attention to the app's photo editing superpowers by noting that it's photo editing made fun with simple to use effects, fonts, shapes and frames as part of the service suite. Picnik has seen 3.8 million hits since up and running last year, 2 million of those have come as API through their affiliate sites such as MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa. Harrington said that the app's popular tooth whitening feature has attracted sponsorship offers from personal care product manufacturers and they were currently entertaining proposals. She noted that their strategy would likely be this parceling out of specific services for specific sponsorship.
OMMA Photos on Flickr
OMMA Flickr Photos
TubeMogul http://www.tubemogul.com is the result of a Berkeley graduate school of business, business plan competition. Winning the highly competitive UC Berkeley business plan competition allowed the three brains behind TubeMogul, including Mark Rotblat, VP of Sales and Marketing, to use office space which allowed them to hone and develop their online video syndication service. TubeMogul allows anyone with a video who wants to post it online to upload to TubeMogul which will then upload your video for you to twelve sites at the same time including Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Revver, Crackle, YouTube, AOL Video, StupidVideos, MetaCafe, Blip.tv and Viddler. It also offers tracking services, marketing and advanced services to those who want to streamline the process of broadcasting their online videos.
OMMA Videos (Link)
Described as the "red-headed stepchild" by panelists, the speakers at the "Texting it in: Maintaining Mobile SMS Relationships" emphasized that even though texting might not be sexy and glamorous like online video, it delivers the message straight to the consumer simply and effectively. Alec Andronikov, Chief Mobile Media Strategist for MoVoxx Mobile Agency emphasized that in this media environment of too much too fast all the time, a simple text message to a cell phone has proven to work for advertisers, "Simplicity of the medium drives the opt-ins," he said. SMS is also the largest data app on the planet; It is the fastest growing communication app in the history of the world and is growing 2X faster than the internet. Texting is practiced by 1.8 billion people, whereas email is used regularly by about 800 million. Bill Jones, President of Air2Web added that, "Brands reach their consumers via the mobile platform. It is really simple and relevant. SMS is a really powerful way to connect to consumers."