Digital Media Conference Season
For digital media nerds like myself, San Francisco is paradise. San Francisco has more conferences about the intersection of media and technology than I can keep up with. I’m lucky that the Cisco office here in the city is close to the Moscone Convention Center, because I can’t always make the amount of time I would like to spend at the events. The proximity to Moscone helps me at least brush by the conferences even if I can’t devote my full attention.
There’s always a lot to be learned at the digital media conferences, and even if you can’t attend, there are many video resources and blog articles on the web to at least be there virtually. I’ll point you to some post conference resources in this post, and also give you my thoughts on some of the key trends and interesting things I learned by attending. Each spring, there is typically a run of conferences in San Francisco - since March, SF has witnessed these conferences come through town - Game Developers Conference, the Web 2.0 Expo, and Ad:Tech.
What were my key takeaways from attending the events?
Game Developers Conference
First in late March, the Game Developers Conference came to San Francisco. Unfortunately, there was a lot on my work plate at the time of this premiere conference for digital gaming businesses, I couldn’t make any panels during the day. Several gaming companies hosted evening events, including Zynga. Zynga designs game experiences that leverage social networks like Facebook as the platform for game play and a way connect with your fellow gamers. I also attended a Game Developers Conference event for a company called Zong which allows mobile phone users to make payments on the go from their phone ; e.g. your cell phone becomes your credit card.
Ironically, most of my conversations at the events turned from gaming to digital music. Based on what I heard, I think we’ll see new intersections of gaming and music content over the next year, in ways different from the typical “play along with the band” experience offered by video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. A few people said to me that they expect to see several new trivia and interactive game experiences added to online music videos in the near future. The other key takeaway, unfortunately is less insightful. I collect “swag” (an acronym for “stuff everybody gets” if you didn’t know) from technology conferences. I would say by far, the Game Developers Conference had the best swag of this recent “conference season”.
Swag from the Game Developers Conference
Resources:
Game Developers Conference Blog
http://www.gdconf.com/news/index.html
CNET News.com Overview of Game Developers Conference 2009
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10202975-235.html?tag=mncol;txt
Web 2.0 Expo
The first week in April the Web 2.0 Expo opened at Moscone, and again I found myself with little time to attend keynotes or panels, but I did want to get over and visit the exhibit hall which is packed full of companies offering platforms to build web sites and deliver web services. Fortunately, my Cisco colleague Johanna Fry did get to some of the Web 2.0 Expo panels. In a recent post for the Cisco DigMediaRev blog, Johanna shared some best practices regarding engaging your online community which she gleaned from a panel there.
I attended an event put on by Yola, which offers a web service for consumers to easily build and then host web sites. I’ve seen a lot of similar web services over the years. Yola didn’t seem remarkably new in the digital media world, but it’s definitely a needed service, especially with Yahoo shuttering the similar service GeoCities.
Yola CEO Vinny Lingham welcoming Web 2.0 Conference Attendees to their event
Adobe also hosted an event where they showed off how their Flash technologies for the web are being integrated into experiences of Facebook users which was interesting. Yet I do remember thinking to myself at the time of the event, that I never want to see or hear a technology presentation ever again in a loud and noisy bar.
What’s really great about the Web 2.0 Expo is that many of the conference presentations given by digital media thought leaders are right on the conference web site accessible to anyone. There’s a ton of material to peruse, covering topics like how to design mobile web experiences, best practices for constructing a social web site, cloud computing for web services, and web site performance.
Resources:
Web 2.0 Presentations:
http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/schedule/proceedings
Web 2.0 News Coverage:
http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/content/news-coverage
Web 2.0 Expo Blog:
Ad:Tech
Ad:Tech was the last conference of this spring run, and I did make a little more time to attend the keynotes and panels. The Ad:Tech conference focuses on technology solutions to deliver advertising digitally to the web, mobile devices, digital media displays, set top boxes, and a myriad of other devices and audiences. The Ad:Tech exhibit halls were booths packed with companies focused on different aspects of advertising technology; the creation of digital ads, email marketing services, digital video advertising systems, web metrics and analytic services. I find it to be a really interesting conference because the advertising industry is being transformed by all the emerging and growing digital and social media platforms. However the exhibit halls were so packed, I found it difficult to take the time to get to know new companies. I mentioned earlier in the post that I like technology conference swag, but some booths (like this one pictured in this Ad:Tech video), were so overloaded with swag, I found myself distracted. I prefer a kiosk or digital display where I can come up and see, and actually demo your advertising technology or service.
The conference kicked off with a keynote from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. In a pre keynote video interview, Mr. Wales said that the most popular wiki entries on Wikipedia relate to gaming and entertainment brands. His presentation focused on the power of consumer generated content, pointing to how Wikipedia is now the 4th most visited website globally.
I found myself getting more and more frustrated with Mr. Wales as his keynote went on. If the most popular wiki entries are entertainment focused, I wondered why Mr. Wales couldn’t somewhere say, Wikipedia in part relies on the popularity of media and entertainment brands. Instead, he kept thanking his staff and the Wiki editors for the overall success. Unfortunately, I believe some Wikipedia entries related to branded content represent media and entertainment companies’ lost opportunities to monetize their own content brands. Wales then wrapped up his talk, by wagging his finger at the newspaper industry, and told them to fire sports reporters and hire fan bloggers to generate the sports content. Here’s his quote:
“I think newspapers should try and invite the community in and take over sports journalism. Avid sport fans write tons of content and there are people who would pay money to have the job of a Sports Illustrated reporter.”
I love reading blogs, but I recognize journalism as a profession distinct from blogging. I’m not going to dominate the rest of this post with the whole what’s the difference between a journalist vs. blogger debate, but I’ll wrap and say I worked at the Wall Street Journal for a number of years, and there certainly is a very big distinction. You can read more about Wales’ statements on newspapers in this MediaPost article reviewing his keynote.
After I left the keynote disgruntled, I got more encouraged upon attending a meeting of the Digital Video Committee of The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The IAB is comprised of more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. The IAB’s Digital Video Committee creates standards and best practices for delivering interactive video advertising and I participate in this committee. At Ad:Tech, the committee reviewed it’s latest work - the Video Player–Ad Interface Definition Guidelines (VPAID) - which outlines methods for communication between video players and video ads and provides specifications that facilitate the planning, production and implementation of digital video advertising. You can read more about VPAID here. Advertisers may want to be able to get their content to as many online video destinations as possible, yet often delivering the ads to different video players with disparate technologies is a nightmare. I was excited to see the VPAID guidelines be released because they will help define a standard method for video ads to communicate with video players and enable ad compatibility across all VPAID-compliant video players.
I’m in digital media nerd heaven at the Ad:Tech Conference book store
I came back to Ad:Tech the next morning for a keynote by Jason Kilar, the CEO of HULU. It was an intriguing presentation, and he talked about how HULU was designed. Kilar said HULU wanted to create a service that users would love, content owners would be happy with, and that advertisers would utilize. Kilar said of first importance in designing HULU was to not let the advertisements interfere with the experience. Kilar showed some screen shots of busy web pages, overloaded with online advertisements. Then Kilar showed “heat maps” of web pages - these are data visualizations of how people actually view a web page - with the “hotter” red areas displayed as representative as the areas viewed by users. You can see some examples of web page “heat maps” here in a post about web design and “banner blindness”. The “Banner Blindness” concept Kilar demonstrated, proves that most people just over look static online ads, no matter how many of them actually appear on a page.
I admit I haven’t been using HULU enough because there were some interesting HULU features new to me, that Kilar reviewed. He demonstrated ways HULU makes advertising more relevant to users of the service and users less “banner blind”. For instance, HULU will remove all advertisements in a piece of video content if you agree to watch a movie trailer in advance of your content selection. This benefits the theatrical marketer who will have your attention for two minutes and you the user, because you are getting a relevant advertisment you are interested in (the trailer). Other examples Kilar pointed to: being able to select the brand that sponsors your HULU site visit (e.g. do you want to see Diet Coke ads, or Sprite ads), and being able to give feedback on an advertisement (vote on whether you like it or not).
I didn’t make it back for the third day at Ad:Tech, instead I had to get back to pressing work here at the Cisco Media Solutions Group. I’m still catching up with other blog posts to learn more about the conferences I attended, like this post from The 60 Second Marketer titled, “The Ten Things I learned at Ad:Tech”. I look forward to getting out again soon and learning more about digital media from my colleagues. Let us know of other conferences you think we should be paying attention to here. I plan to get out again later in May to hear about digital music trends at the San Francisco Music Technology Summit.
Resources:
Videos from Ad:Tech - YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/adtechsf
Ad:Tech Conference Blog:
Twitter user name list of Ad:Tech Panelists / Speakers
http://www.ad-tech.com/sf/adtech_san_francisco_blogroll.aspx
Posted by Chuck Fishman at 01:59PM PST
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