Updates from April, 2008
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Haris Khan
Today was the much awaited ad:Tech San Francisco . First off was a keynote presentation by Kodak CMO, Jeff Hayzlett. I will say it was the best session of the day. It was interesting to see that how big firms like Kodak are embracing the niche area marketing strategy rather then to conquer the entire world strategy. Kodak canceled its Olympic sponsorship that they use to sponsor for so many years. This will open up great avenues for niche content providers, as now they are one of the main advertising channels for big corporates like Kodak.
Another interesting thing I noticed was that how much effort Kodak makes to get its value statement out there. Jeff mentioned that they created a special challenge in The Apprentice show around Kodak and his prime objective was not just the product placement but to also get its value statement repeated again and again by the stars. They also showed a very cool ad, which was just created for their internal employees. It was an offset of their The Sopranos ad campaign (as its an internal ad so coulndt find it on YouTube).
There was another panel discussion “The Art of Conversation” which in my opinion was a complete flop. In my view the panel was just not able to connect to the crowd and it was very visible by the fact that everyone was either leaving or just not paying attention. The panel was just too busy to get cozy to each other.
Finally there was this huge exhibit hall. Now I will try to put another post on few good companies I found on the floor but I will just finish it off with a single thought.
There were so many digital marketing firms out there that I can only think of one word again and again, which was BUBBLE!! I am kind of confused that do we need so many firms just to track our behavior online, considering dominant ad networks already have a pretty decent reach. Anyway, one thing is for sure that with so many marketing/tracking firms, you should say bye bye to online privacy.
