NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> Jupiter Conference by ClickZ - 8/12/98
ONLINE-ADS>> Jupiter Conference by ClickZ - 8/12/98
richard_at_tenagra.com
Wed, 12 Aug 1998 16:06:36 -0500 (CDT)
Below is a special mailing to The Online Advertising Discussion
List about the Jupiter Online Advertising Conference, written by
Ann Handley, editor-in-chief of The ClickZ Network. You will
receive these reports in addition to your normal Online Ads
posts/digests.
*********************************************************************
Jupiter Online Advertising Conference
Day One Coverage: Making Sense of Ad Technologies
Ann Handley
Editor in Chief
The ClickZ Network
http://www.clickz.com/
*********************************************************************
Day one of the Jupiter forum was subtitled, "Making Sense of Ad
Technologies." And while it seemed that many of the heaviest
hitters tried to do just that, they did so with moderate success,
at best.
The top guns of the industry's biggest ad management companies were
well in attendance. We're talking DoubleClick, 24/7, NetGravity,
i33 Communications to name a few. But the group agreed on little
more than the fact that online ad management technologies are, at
most, uneven in performance and often unreliable; one-to-one
marketing is still evolving; and promising rich media campaigns
remain, well mostly just promising.
But as Solbright President Key Compton pointed out, "Online
advertising is just a baby. And a baby cries a lot. So you have to
put the pain in context."
Nevertheless, there were plenty of colorful moments at the
conference most notably, when Starwave's Patrick "Doesn't Mince
Words" Naughton charged in his morning keynote address that
third-party ad serving is a raw deal for advertisers and site
publishers alike. Naughton was followed on stage by a panel that
included none other than DoubleClick's Kevin O'Connor.
Of course, O'Connor defended third party ad serving systems, as did
several other speakers throughout the day. Naughton, for his part,
side-stepped the crowds calling for blood and caught an immediate
flight back the West Coast.
Other highpoints included Jupiter analysts Evan Neufeld and David
Card debating the vagaries of various new online ad technologies
and products, and a la Siskel and Ebert rating them thumb's up
or down. (Rich media: Two hesitant thumb's up. All-in-one packages:
Thumb's down from Evan, thumb's up from Dave.)
Evan also coined a new phrase with this description of the
percentage of users who offer phony demographics to free email
service companies: Fib rate.
And before he jettisoned to the airport, Patrick Naughton shared a
few things he's learned about web publishing:
*Do things in as few ways as possible.
*Design systems for 100 times your current load.
*Move quickly but cautiously on new technology, and don't jump on
the newest and coolest just because it's new and cool.
*Put your best people closest to the money even if those aren't
typically the highest-paying positions.
Later on in the day, i33's Drew Rayman was refreshingly honest in his
No-More-PowerPoint-Please discussion on the shortcomings of ad
serving technology that continually underdelivers on impressions.
Asked by ClickZ's Andy Bourland to name names and get specific, he
pointed toward representatives from AdForce (formerly IMGIS) and
NetGravity as the source of most of the problems he encounters,
underdelivering at a consistent rate of anywhere from 10 to 50
percent. Not surprisingly, Rayman demonstrated his own ad
management solution offered exclusively to advertisers.
And Scott Kaufman of AdKnowledge talked about the pack mentality of
advertisers on the web, where the top 10 sites get 64 percent of
all advertising revenue. Said he: "The media-centric food chain is
not fully developed."
Finally, Macromedia's Norm Meyrowitz demoed some pretty cool rich
media sponsorship and advertising vehicles, injecting a healthy
dose of his good humor, to boot.
Some of the speakers at the Jupiter event unfortunately used their
floor time to pitch their companies and products, which made for an
uneven agenda. It would have been more useful for those in the
audience to hear where these executives are at, what they are
wrestling with currently, what solutions they've discovered . After
all, most of those in the audience already knew why they were
there. A little less pitch, a little more punch.
But that left plenty of time to comb the exhibit area for good
tchotchkes, so I'm not complaining. In between all the t-shirts,
keychains, magnets and mouse pads were some pretty novel things.
Most notable was the offering of boston.com, which gets the newly
minted Most Innovative Use of Tchotchkes Award.
Not every attendee may necessarily make it to every booth. But it's
a sure bet that each person there will visit the bathroom once or
twice. Boston.com gets big points for sponsoring the bathrooms --
putting their branded toothbrushes, toothpaste and towelettes right
in front of everyone there far away from the maddening crowd.
*********************************************************************
Copyright (C) 1998 ClickZ Corporation. All rights reserved. May
be reproduced in any medium for noncommercial purposes as long as
attribution is given.
*********************************************************************
