Transcript

Past keynote speakers for ad:tech have included Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi; Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba; Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine; Deborah Wahl-Meyer, VP Marketing at Lexus; Fernando Madeira, CEO of Terra Latin America; Shawn Gold, the former CMO of MySpace and Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic. Panel discussions cover topics from interactive television and social marketing, to the dynamics of the client-agency relationship and the future of marketing. Workshops deliver actionable instruction ranging from Website and search optimization to e-mail campaign and database management.


This is Lawrence Price from FreshBusinessThinking.com. Welcome to Ad tech 2009, the event for Interactive Marketers, now let's go and check it out.

It is one of the most premier events for advertising in the UK and in Europe as well.
You've got people from all over the industry, we've spoken to different publishers as well.

I've come to AdTech because I've got some clients here and I am just having a look around to see if I can find out a little bit more about the industry that they work in and see if there are any opportunities for the company that I work for.

It's really critical for us to keep face to face contact with our advertisers, to teach people about new things which are coming out and also our product and to also keep an eye on what everyone else is doing.

So far I've sat through a couple of seminars and just gaining information about the industry and what's really going on and just try to get more of an inside really and feedback to some of my colleagues, and to work around things and also to network.

It has been really busy this year, I think last year wasn't as busy maybe because of the economic climate, but this year we've definitely got a lot more people coming over to our stand, it seems we're a lot busier generally.

It's been very busy, it's not been good for my feet but it's been great for the business, it's been absolutely fantastic. So a mixture of prospects in clients but we've been pretty busy all way through.

The economic downturn has really affected advertising models, from the profanation of ad networks was something I really noticed, I actually took a stroll before, and you see that there is a real maturity in all kinds of affiliated networks. Obviously mobile marketing is something I'm involved in also, you see a lot of mobile marketing, I think that is one of the areas that is going to grow very, very strong, and I think there is a lot of maturity in all kinds of ad servers and technical solutions around ad serving, I think those are the main things I am seeing at this moment.

So, how important would you say online marketing is at the moment considering the economic downturn?
I think online marketing provides much more measurability, the statistics, the accountability is there.
You are able to track a user all the way from an Impression to the actual final conversion, it's not like chucking money into TV or Radio where you have no idea what is actually happening. Especially during a recession you need to be able to prune your marketing campaign to cut out and switch on who's actually delivering kosher 'ROI' (Return on Investment). And because online campaigns are so accountable you are able to do that far better than the TV or a Radio campaign. So I think you'll probably see that during this recession online budget spenders funds far better than other forms of media.


So there we have it, AdTech 2009. It's been really interesting to see the way which online marketing is helping so many companies through the economic crisis. This is Lawrence Price, FreshBusinessThinking.com