Optimism Meets Reality: On the Ground at ad:tech

Peter Kafka — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:02:41 +0000

There’s an ongoing debate about how bad the online ad market has become and will get (your choices: less good, bad or very bad). But that isn’t stopping the organizers of ad:tech from putting on their annual, um, advertising and technology show this week.

This should be a good place to gauge the state of the industry, but it’s also a dizzying one: There are a couple hundred booths and dozens of panels to navigate. So MediaMemo asked an ad:tech veteran for a guide: Mike Lazerow, whose Buddy Media specializes in getting big brands to advertise on social networks like Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace.

Lazerow’s first suggestion was to catch CNN president Jon Klein’s keynote this morning. But voting lines nixed that idea (suggestion for next time–Brooklyn district 91 needs more voting machines). Other highlights from Lazerow’s itinerary:

Another must-see keynote is the ‘state of the industry’ on Tuesday, moderated by Internet Advertising Bureau chief Randall Rothenberg. I usually stay away from any panel featuring five people with giant titles on the same stage together. But Randall is an uber-sharp strategist and thought-leader and promises to lead a compelling panel discussion that aims to cut through the noise of the digital marketing world.

… By far the most compelling Data panel is Wednesday’s ‘The Future of Measurement–How Do We Define the New Media Currency?’ David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer, hosts leaders of the major metrics firms, Nielsen Online, Hitwise, comScore, Quantcast and Microsoft’s Analytics and Atlas Institute. The focus of the panel will be how to create universal metrics to gauge the success and determine the pricing of all digital media that Google doesn’t hold a claim to. I encourage the panelists to grab a drink with each other afterward to move closer to common metrics. …

The ad network panel that will be most interesting is Thursday’s late-afternoon session ‘So Many Networks, So Little Time: Analyzing the Digital Network Landscape,’ hosted by David Joseph, head of the interactive entertainment research group at Morgan Stanley.

The real title of the panel should be ‘Online Ad Networks: Why There Are Too Many and Why They Will Be Out of Business Soon.’ While the world wants another ad network as much as I want my third heart surgery, these buy-siders will help sift through the confusion of the already over-crowded ad network space.

… For the most part, avoid all panels that have ‘innovation,’ ‘synergy’ and ‘dispatches from’ in the title. Stick with panels featuring companies that HAVE money (agencies, brands) and not companies that are selling solutions (startups, vendors and the major ad networks and sites). What matters is what the brands and agencies are buying, not what we want to sell them!”

And yes, Lazerow is on a panel himself: “Mobilizing and Leveraging Consumer Insights: Best Practices for the Digital and Social Media Age” kicks off at 2:45 p.m., and he assures me the discussion will be more interesting than the name. See you there.

One Time Inc. Casualty: Digital Boss Ned Desmond

Peter Kafka — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:51:16 +0000

Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. still hasn’t figured out exactly how many people the magazine publisher will fire this fall–the 600 number the New York Times reported earlier this week, we’re told, is a guesstimate. But as Ann Moore and co. sort that out, they are moving ahead with plenty of high-level org chart changes, which are being laid in a series of text-heavy memos.

One of note for MediaMemo readers: The departure of Ned Desmond, a longtime Time Inc. vet who was most recent title was President of Time Inc. Interactive. Ned’s bio is here; nice-to-know-you memo from Ann Moore follows:

To: Time Inc. Employees

From : Ann Moore and John Squires

Re: Staff Announcement

As a consequence of the organizational changes outlined yesterday, our longtime Time Inc. colleague, Ned Desmond, President of Time Inc. Interactive, is leaving the company.

Ned is leaving after 22 years with Time Inc. and having had one of the more distinctive careers we’ve seen. He distinguished himself as a correspondent for TIME in Asia for nearly a decade, serving as TIME bureau chief in both New Delhi and Tokyo, and then left to dabble in technology in Silicon Valley. He then returned to Time Inc. as a senior correspondent at FORTUNE under John Huey, and was later charged to start eCompany Now magazine and website, eventually to be named Business 2.0. After three years of hard labor in the midst of the tech blow out, John convinced him to leave his beloved northern California to run Time Inc. Interactive.

That was six years ago, and it’s bracing to recall how much ground Ned, his excellent TII team, and the company as a whole have covered in that short time. We went from being a digital backwater, or “black hole” as one Time Inc. notable once called it, to joining the highest ranks of digital media with great properties like People.com, CNNMoney.com and SI.com, to name a few. Time Inc.’s digital leadership under Ned has been extraordinary. Our websites now receive more than 26 million unique visitors each month and we are one of the top 20 largest online media properties in monthly unique visitors, page views and time spent per user.

Ned played a leading role in creating the vision for our digital future while at the same time literally building that future by hiring many of our key digital leaders, developing more compelling consumer experiences on our sites, championing the use of metrics and audience development, raising our technology smarts, and wiring our businesses into the digital powerhouses at AOL, Yahoo, Google and elsewhere. In a way, Ned and his TII team succeeded so well at it that, well, there’s not much revolutionizing left to do. The time has arrived to move all the digital responsibility to the new teams in our new Business Units, where, to no surprise, many of the key leaders are folks Ned brought into the company.

We’re sorry to see Ned leave but he’ll always be remembered for his vast contributions in making Time Inc. a leading digital player.

Please join us in thanking Ned for his many contributions to Time Inc. and wishing him the very best.

A.M. J.S.

AllThingsD » Ned Desmond

Optimism Meets Reality: On the Ground at ad:tech

One Time Inc. Casualty: Digital Boss Ned Desmond