Day one of the Future of Online Advertising conference has ended, and now that I am at home in my cushioned rocking chair, I have had some time to sit and reflect about the events of the day. Here, uncensored, unedited, and unsponsored, are 10 things that really sucked about the Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference. Just ten. Any more, and I’d be seen as ungrateful. My ticket was free, after all.
Okay, the list:
- Free Wi-Fi connection - Powered by Urban Hotspots, the Wi-Fi was absolutely atrocious. It worked during breakfast, stopped functioning right as the conference began, and was annoyingly spotty the rest of the day. For a $1000 conference, this is pretty much inexcusable. And seriously - this is freakin’ New York City for crying out loud!
- Lunch - One could hardly call this hour-and-a-half long “hor d'oeuvres and glorified potty break” a meal. A handful of busboy/girl-types made their way through the crowd offering scraps of food. A tiny piece of turkey wrap here, a few (really, just three!) veggie sticks there, a portion of Caesar salad in a takeout container fit for an anorexic king. It all tasted just fine. Quite a disappointment. The several snack times were also loath-able, as they consisted of little more than leftovers of the breakfast pastries (For the final break they had Kashi GoLean bars. I tried the peanut butter and chocolate one. It tasted...healthy.).
- Web 2.0 - The number of people I overheard pitching their startups to each other was frankly disappointing. “Yeah, we basically started it with no outside funds, just our own money.” seemed to be the sentence of the day. What are these wonderful startups-to-be? “Basically it’s, like, a social network for xxxxx. I can’t believe no one else has already done something in this space!” It’s official - I’m over Web 2.0. Check back in a week or so for my eulogy. I’m serious.
- CPC, CPA, CPM, CPI, CPU, CPMMORPGORLYROFLLOLWTF - There is no way that the presenters and audience members who spewed these inane metric acronyms at a rate of 10 per second have any idea which ones they were using. “Are we allowed to skip straight to CPA instead of starting with CPM for brand awareness and moving to CPC for educating and refining or can I just jump straight to monetizing my mechanical bull by selling it on eBay at a loss?” Yeah, no thanks. I think I’ll focus on the ROI of my LMNOP.
- Overeager Conference Staff - During the final break, conference staff went through the rows of chairs collecting all of the “unclaimed” magazines that had been placed on seats for attendees. They also took anything else (like program booklets) that added to the clutter. Nice idea - to get a jump start on cleaning the auditorium - but one thing: no one was in his/her seats, so everything looked unclaimed. Including my schedule of events booklet in which I was taking notes. Yeah. At least they left my 12-inch-long PayPerPost pen that I intended to give to my roommate.
- Powerpoint - I don’t think I need to explain why this is awful. Just take my word for it - some of the worst Powerpoint presentations I’ve seen in my life. Not across the board, but enough for me to seriously consider “forgetting” my glasses tomorrow morning.
- Teenage Executives - Sorry, but if you are still in high school, you do not deserve to be wearing an “Executive” nametag. I don’t care if you just got funded by some clueless V.C. - you are still lame and you are not the next Mark Zuckerberg. Not fooling anyone, dudes. Get a diploma.
- Creatives - First, I hate this name. Creative is an adjective, not a noun. Second, why does everyone with a Creative name tag have to wear jeans and an edgy t-shirt and carry a shabby-chic mail bag slash laptop case? I had a Creative tag myself, mostly because there wasn’t anything else on the list of possibilities that sounded good either: Developer? Publisher? Marketer? Media Buyer? Advertiser? SEO & SEM? Executive? So many great choices! I hate reductive labels like these - part of the problem with advertising (and business) today is that things are so segmented like this. Marketing in the future is not about “ad units,” it’s about an entire experience that can only be created by passionate people stretching across and blurring traditional boundaries of discipline, media, and demographic. You are your company’s own best brand manager. The medium is no longer the message. The message is whatever your audience decides they want it to be.
- No Future - Until the final (and great) panel discussion, the closest anyone got to discussing the future of online advertising was when Kim Malone of Google mentioned that her company would be adding Cost Per Action (CPA) ads sometime soon. I realize that many in the audience might have found some of the previous talks incredibly enlightening and on-the-edge, but as a semi-outside observer of the industry, I can’t wrap my head around how prehistoric-sounding much of the discussion was. Maybe I just read too many forward-looking feeds to have an accurate perception of the industry.
- One Woman - Yeah, only one woman spoke today - the above-mentioned Kim Malone of Google, who did a decent job, but wasn’t given anything terribly interesting to talk about. Two are slated to speak tomorrow, it seems. Two. That makes three. Out of about 25. This is just stupid for a ton of reasons I won’t get into here, but especially since the copy of Advertising Age they gave attendees had its annual feature on 25 Women to Watch, which showcased some pretty hardcore chicks who would’ve been awesome to hear speak. At the very least, any one of those women would have been far better than a couple of the male speakers today (I won’t name names unless you ask), whose talks were just painful and pointless and short-sighted.
Finally, if you’re at the conference and on Twitter, why not Follow me?
14 comments:
Hey kev,
How did you manage to get in free to this event?
The photo expo that's coming up in October should be more exciting.
I'll agree with you on a few of your points:
* The wifi was really, REALLY frustrating
* I too overheard quite a few pretentious conversations from very arrogant people
* Some of the PPT was really bad, but I think the disparity was more glaring because of the gentleman from Yahoo, whose presentation was actually really good
I think we found your booklet - you can come and pick it up from the Speakers, sponsors and press registration desk, where we'll be happy to comment on a lot of your points.
Thanks
Lisa (Carson Systems)
ps. the wifi worked fine in the afternoon.
Zuluqueen: Business blogging guru Seth Godin posted on his blog a few months ago that the first 5 folks to send an email to a specific address would get a free pass. Somehow I was quick enough, even though I got the story in my feed reader! Lucky!
Paul, thanks for your comment, and I agree about the frustration with the wi-fi. Even after lunch it wasn't working perfectly, but so far this morning it seems to be working great.
Lisa, thanks for taking the time to respond to my thoughts - I'm really surprised you found my booklet (or someone else's booklet with notes haha!) I will try to get back to the desk today to chat with you. And by the way, take my rant with a grain of salt - I think the conference has been great, definitely worth my time (and would be worth the money had I paid), and I look forward to day two. I promise I'll have some really good things to say about it after it's all over and I can use the keynotes as a jumping-off point into further musings on ads in the future.
Kevin, first off nice post - couldn't agree more about the Wi-Fi.
"# Teenage Executives - Sorry, but if you are still in high school, you do not deserve to be wearing an “Executive” nametag."
- Phew! Just made it, I am 20. Then again I didn't wear the executive tag either.
"Second, why does everyone with a Creative name tag have to wear jeans and an edgy t-shirt and carry a shabby-chic mail bag slash laptop case?"
- I wore the creative tag, but chose it the same way you did considering all the tags kinda stunk. I am wearing an "edgy t-shirt" right now as I sit in on Day 2, but it's merely an advertisement plug. Finally, jeans are comfortable!
Look forward to tomorrow's post on FOOA, and maybe I'll run into you at some point today.
AJ - Couldn't agree more about the jeans, actually. I'm just glad to get a couple days off work to be a little more semi-semi-casual.
You're doing a great job blogging the event yourself. Related to Gary Vaynerchuk of the wine world?
Kevin, Yep I am the brother of Gary Vaynerchuk of the Wine World who is so devastated he couldn't attend this wonderful (outside of the few problems) event
Kevin - thanks for starting this conversation, I will post my response to this on my blog.
Kevin,
Thought you were dead on with your assessment of FOOA. I would add the following:
1. All sizzle very little steak. The venue was dynamic, the speakers were not. Really outside of Jim Coudall, who offered nothing relevent to my business, there were no speakers that grabbed you, that captivated your interest. I would sum up the day as "here's my pitch, blah blah blah."
2. I can wipe my own hands and other parts, thank you. Nothing screams pretentious like a bathroom attendent. I don't know if that was the doing of Carson Systems or it came built in with Gotham Hall, but please people we seriously don't need a bathroom attendent.
3. What do you do? "Well I blah blah blah blah, and we are working on a startup web 2.0 blog blah blah blah." After a few of these such conversations, I ran out of interest of even interacting with everyone.
4. Are we at a wedding? I would agree, that lunch wasn't lunch It felt more like a wedding, with a series of tray carriers carting through offering you a snack here and a snack there.
5. Wifi Why? Yes the wifi was horrendous. Embarassing for a tech based conference, in New York of all places to not have a reliable wifi connection. I don't know what or who Urban Hotspots is, but I certainly wouldn't be proud of promoting my product that doesn't work. And please Ryan, don't tell a room full of geeks on day number two to try and only use the wifi to check email, you can't be serious.
6. More Technical Difficulties: If it wasn't the sound not working, or someones PPT presentation not functioning, it was something else. Yet the horrible techno music summoning everyone back to their seats alerting us that the conference was starting back up, worked flawlessly, unfortunately. And Kev, please don't try and find a silver lining on the conference by praising that horrible music.
7. Q&A - Uggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I thought that perhaps a refreshing break from many of the robotic presentations was their openness to integrating Q&A into their presentations. Bad idea. Open mic only opened the door to either geeks who were afraid to speak but seemed to get up on a dare or in their effort to "practice public speaking," please everyone, just join toastmasters and practice there. Or on the other hand, geek blow hards that just loved to hear themselves talk, and were really just standing up to stretch their legs and their vocal cords as well. Lastly their was the asian guy in the front row who insisted on getting up and asking questions to nearly every presenter, the best of which when he rambled on for a good couple of minutes before the panel at the end of the day asked him "what is your question."
8. Enough ass kissing. Every other presenter had to kiss the ass of the previous presenter, and kiss the ass of Carson Systems, "thank you for inviting me here, and for putting on this great conference, and blah blah blah." Although in contrast it was funny when various presenters contradicted other presenters. That alone was entertaining.
9. Its Not Only About You. There were all of I think five booths in the mezzanine area. And without fail everytime I approached a booth to find out about their product, someone approached at the same time, and was completely oblivious that maybe there was someone else in the room. This is how it would go down. Me "Hi, tell me about your product." Booth Guy "Ohh sure, well we offer a way for you to upload video to your site, and we host all of your video on our servers." Geek "Ok, so for example I run a family blog. Its for new fathers and new familiies, and its just getting going but what I'm thinking is that new fathers and families could maybe upload video. . ."
10. We Don't Have an Unlimited Budget! So many of the presenters would talk about their product that I assure you 99% of the people in the room couldn't afford. There is a reason why Google Adwords is the big dog in the kennel. Its affordable, it works, and everyone can use it. The future of online advertising can't be just for big companies, most of which aren't even reprented at this conference.
Anyhow, that's my rant. Kev, I don't know you from Adam, but I would say your observations from Day One were really right on, and just because Lisa wrote you a couple line comment, shouldn't be reason for you to be anything other than honest in your summary of day two.
Justin - thanks. Great list. Agreed. And don't worry about my honesty and integrity. I intend to give Lisa and the conference all my respect and fairness, but what's bad is bad and saying so will only help their conferences in the future.
RE: the music, which I twittered about - yeah, that needed a /sarcasm tag.
i am so jealous i am not there. =( thanks to twitter though, i have a seat right next to you. sort of.
(how's that for an ad?!)
Great post - you even covered some of the more subliminal ones I hadn't realised! Totally agree re. the categorisation thing, and the execs thing (although they must have money - did you have a spare $1000 when you were just out of school?). I've linked your more rounded post to mine. And thanks for your comment. :-)
I thought the whole day was pretty good. I didn't get to the second day, was it better? The last panel kicked ass and I thought it was the best. I really hope they do more of that future looking stuff and get those guys back next year. They were really good and even disagreed with each other which was even better.
Day two was better for the most part - and the diversity of the speakers was welcome. It was more forward looking, more varied approaches to advertising, and there was some focus on the publisher side of things, too.
Nothing as great as the panel on the first day - but that would've been hard to beat.
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