**This is Part 2 of my ad:tech posts that were cross posted over at MadAve Journal***
When large corporations have massive layoffs like the one Citigroup announced recently, it puts it into perspective what is important to you. As the timeless bromide goes, "No person ever said while on their deathbed, gee I wish I had spent more time at work". When you see your friends that spent their careers at say AT&T, hit with pink-slips you realize that what is important to you is what matters to you most. And in order to do what matters most, you need a little coin to keep you going.
When I left Harrisdirect after the E*Trade acquisition which ended almost 15 years of being a George Jetson in corporate America, I learned that there really is life outside HQ. Fact is a lot of the folks that I do business with today can't believe I actually had a 9 to 5 life. What I learned was you can earn a living, spend more time with you family, and be productive without the safety net mirage that large corporations sell you on.
If you can land at a company like some of sponsors that have realistic outlooks at why they are in business and they match up with your own personal goals, you truly can have a life outside the monolithic corporations and you can stop being a Spacely cog. Someone has to make money and it might as well be you doing what you like to do on your own terms.
It's the End of the Ads as We Know It
In the end I had a lot of responses about citizen ads and how social marketing will change the way people get sales information. "When we do end-user testing, we hear over and over that people actually want to see relevant advertising," Richard Frankel, Senior Product Director at Yahoo exclaimed which surprised me a bit at first read.
I don't think people want any advertising, but if they have to trade off free 411 calls or free content on a news site, they want those ads to be relevant. Relevancy really becomes viable when it is also highly personalized especially when a friend provides the marketing. Technology and online advertising now allows you to "do all (your) my shopping in the comfort of (your) my own home and leverage the collective wisdoms of thousands of real-world product experts," Richard added later on.
Changing the way product messaging is delivered in a highly personalized manner is what technology is bringing to the masses. Agencies and marketers need to adapt to the way people want messaging delivered to them. "More than ever, the personal side of ad:tech is about marketing for the people, by the people, and what role professional marketers have to play in this," Rohit Bhargava VP, Interactive Marketing of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide points out the challenge marketers face today.
Blogs, RSS, Twitter, YouTube, Google, and other technologies today have upped the ante on what consumers consider to be ads and the ones that fail to embrace the ending of ads as we knew it, will end up as yesterday's snake oil salesmen with a one horse carriage in a town looking to drum up business by screaming on a platform.
Well that's a wrap for me on the personal side of ad:tech. Please email me and let me know what you enjoyed best/least about the San Francisco conference. I'm most interested in hearing back from people about what they thought of the "the schwag at the booths," because as Harold Mann pointed out, "It's the sign of a healthy economy!"
Finally, I'd like to use this forum to give one bigger "shout out" to my buddy Sam Negin, thankfully now stationed right now over in Germany after serving time on behalf of our country in Iraq!
Those of us who have staked our careers on the enlightened benefits of new media deserve nowhere's near the level of gratitude and respect that people such as Sam and others have made to theirs.
My hope is that the commitment we collectively make as the next generation of new media evangelists and conversationalists can somehow make the world a slightly better place. The desire to generate freedom in the world is but one similarity we all share and can all be proud of.
Another is that the people we have gotten to know and respect in this business will be awarded next week for their commitment to this space. My advice for everyone is to continue to support ad:tech as much I support being a charter member of the Samo Medical Plan. Both give us great coverage and in the end, on an annualized basis are great values, in exchange for what, the cost of a little beer money!
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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