Advertising Club Meetup: Roundup September 17, 2007

I attended my very first (I believe it was actually only second one) Advertising Club Meetup last night. The event was sponsored by Yahoo (it was held at their offices, thanks Yahoo) and Mimeo and was hosted by Jeff Grill, VP of Mimeo.


The event even got coverage in Mediapost, how cool! Meetup.com has hit the mainstream.


Overall I am glad that I went. I learned a bunch of things and networked with a few great folks.


I am however going to make a few criticisms before I get into the play by play.



  • If you are going to give a Meetup a title, try and stick to the title.



    • The title of this Meetup was “Brand Content”. In my opinion only 3 of the 5 speakers were relevant to this topic. I am not complaining, one of the speakers who were not relevant was great, but it is always important to set expectations.



  • Pay Per Post (disclaimer: this is a personal note emotion) I am really not a fan of what Pay Per Post (for the sole reason that there are advertisers can say, “Say nice things about me, or say nothing at all) is doing and try to avoid getting their sales pitch at all costs. Furthermore, they are not new, and presented nothing new. I have seen it so many times before and could have done without it last night.


Here are the speakers and a few bullets for each (in order of appearance)


Andrew Boer, Vice President Of Business Development—Associated Content


This is the second time that I head Andrew speak (the first was at the Tech Meetup). I have to say he was very entertaining this go around. He began with a history of advertising and it went something like this:



  • Era of Proximity

  • Era Of Publishing

  • Era Of Distribution

  • Era of Declared Interest


(Andrew, if you make your deck embeddable, or just send it to me, I will post it)


If you would like to know more about any of these era’s, leave me comment, or better still, shoot Andrew an email (as a Biz Dev guy, I am sure he will not mind).


He then spoke about AC’s model entitled, “The People’s Media Company”.


I don’t have the time to go into the full model, but one thing I do ask of all the A Mediacirc.Us readers out there; when you do your research, tell me if this model reminds you of any other model.


Pay Per Post—Rob Leland


Every blogger in the worlds know what this is, so I will not spare you the details. The only thing I will ask (once again) is, how is this not payola?


MindComet


Next Up was a really interesting interactive agency called MindComet. Being the poor journalist that I am (if you can even call me a journalist) I did not get the gentleman’s name who spoke last night and he does not appear to be on the site.


LESSON: When a member of your team does ANYTHING in public, by some keywords surrounding their name, relevant phrases and the event they spoke at. Harness the power of the search halo effect.


He spoke about an interactive Texas Hold Em game that was produced for Copenhagen, in which user could get virtual currency (kids, pay attention to this space, for real!)for entering personal information, as well as codes that were seen in traditional media. I really love this last idea, as I love anything that can bridge the gap between traditional and interactive media.


Finally found the name: Bruce Neslaw


Gad Romann, CEO The Romann Group




  • Jeff Grill said he coined the phrase “branded content”




  • One would think it this was the case I could find some info on it online, nontheless this guy was really cool!




  • “New Technologies Obscure Brands”




  • “We need to maintain the Church of The Brand”




  • Spoke about brand narratives and the combination of consumer narratives and brand narratives




  • Love this! The only person who touched on collaboration and co creation




  • We need to “reinvent the narrative”




  • SEARCH ENGINE NARRATIVE




  • He told of a project that he is working on and mentioned the phrase “search engine narrative”. I have never heard this before, but I love it!




  • I wish I could define it for you, but I need further clarification. Gad, if you are out there, write my readers a post on this :)




Finally Gad spoke about media neutral communities and that brands need to be everywhere, right on sir!


Judy Shapiro, CEO Emergent Marketing


Judy, although not relevant to the subject of the meetup (I suspect it was not her fault) was really cool. She spoke about SEO and PR and her notion of “Search Engine Volume” and building content campaigns in order to drive mass traffic.


I agreed with much of what she said and always love hearing PR people talk SEO.


Herb Yost, National Account Executive, Direct Group


He spoke about a product called Read Smart. I suggest looking it up, I don’t even know how to begin to explain this :)


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