Notes From OMMA Global March 2008

Just getting back from the OMMA Global Confernence in Hollywood.  The theme of the show was "welcome to the machine."  Meaning that the advertising business is getting more consistently machine automated and moving online.

One of the more interesting keynotes was from Comscore’s CEO, Gian Fulgone.  His speech titled
"The Internet Machine Spits Out: Media Dust!"  I’ll link to the slides once they are posted but his speech was not surprisingly full of data.  Here were some nuggets:

• Only 1/3 of online advertising is branding oriented
• Online advertising was $21.1 billion in 2007;  41% of that was search, 24% display, 17% classifieds, 10% rich media, and the rest "other". 
• Total US Media business is $296.1 billion – only 7% is online
• Only 7% is online but 17% of all media is consumed online
• Only 3% of packaged goods companies spend money online (25% for financial services)

One of the things that struck me as interesting was the themes that I found myself trying to answer 10 years ago in online advertising-namely how do you consistently measure it.  Some interesting stats from his talk:
– in 60 years of TV, there have been only 5 metrics to define the business
– in 13 years of online advertising, there are 13 types of metrics

The themes of having too much data were definitely echoed at the conference and having more focus on paying attention to the right data.  Gian made mention of how CTRs are not relevant
to judge true performance due to the nature of who is really clicking on these ads. He cited that 50% of all clicks are heavy clickers with demographics that are not big brand friendly: 25-44 males making under $40K.  I’ll direct readers back to my post on this subject. 

Have you ever heard of Comscore underreporting your traffic?  Of course.  Gian did a nice job of explaining that 30% of Internet users delete their cookies.  Of that population, they delete them 4x month-he thinks that there is a 2.5x overstatement of of UUs in most companies search logs.

The day was full of some interesting keynotes from Patrick Keane, EVP/CMO of CBS Interactive.
Patrick did a great job of showing the metrics that they follow to track different metrics alongside offline media.  Patrick Keane is someone I knew when he was an analyst at Jupiter.  He had some interesting points and conceptually I didn’t think about the PV implications of some of the new mediums like Facebook and YouTube in terms of pageviews over the last 18 months.  Do an Alexa search and check it out for yourself.  Pretty wild to think that YouTube has such a large footprint and still only 2% of impressions when compared to TV.

Johnathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn talked a lot about their interest in the prosumer content creation space.  They think that the UGC content adds bulk but little value and the that the "super-sumer" content is primarily high quality yet re-purposed TV content.  Hmmmm.  I must admit that a lot of what these keynotes opined about was what we were thinking about years ago at Atom-content distributed everywhere, anytime, and how you want it.