Paul Woods

The short answer is… Day one = No, Day Two = Got it across the line

I must admit I had some pretty high expectations of this conference.  After reading a lot of the buzz around the New York show in November, ad:tech Sydney had a lot of promise.

Unfortunately my first day at the conference didn’t start off as well as I thought.  I flew down to Sydney on one of the early flights on Wednesday morning.  Not normally an issue, however I had suffered from a pretty intense headcold the last few days.  Note to readers – Aircraft pressurisation and sinus trouble does not mix!  The result… my ears didn’t pop during the decent into Sydney, and remained in that very painful state for about 10 hours!  Despite the pain, and the slight loss of hearing I ploughed on into the Sydney Hilton for the Keynote from Shawn Gold, MySpace.com’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Opening Keynote: Shawn Gold, CMO, MySpace.com

It is amazing some of the figures that Shawn mentioned during his keynote.  I was quite impressed to hear that HUMANS! check every image and video upload to MySpace – from memory that was on average 300 000 images, and 40 000 videos every day! 

One of Shawn’s more interesting topics was about the evolution of social networking.  From the days of the church through to the online world.  He then went onto “why did MySpace succeed when the likes of Geocities and Friendster didn’t?”  I think he hit the nail on the head – it was just pretty good timing.  As MySpace rose to prominence, so did the pervasiveness of the Digital Camera!  Now people could really express their individuality in a way that they couldn’t do easily before.  And MySpace let them do it!

The one disappointing thing about the opening keynote was the Q&A style – obviously most of these are scripted, and this one was no exception.  It was not as smooth, not as natural as it should have been and I think that alone distracted quite a few in the room.

The rest of the two days…

I will not give you a run down on every session I attended, however I thought it would be best to talk about the best (and worst) sessions of the two days of ad:tech Sydney.

The WORST session of the entire conference:
Website Design and Navigation Best Practices

I don’t know about most people, but when I see a session about “Best Practices”, I generally expect to hear at least one “Best Practice”.  The speakers looked as though they had spent a good 5 minutes preparing their presentations, and to top that off there was no ‘meat’ there that anyone in the audience could actually use in the real world.  The only takeaway I found from this session was to “Listen to your Customers”… hmmm I am glad my employer paid $1400 for that pearl of wisdom!  I think this session should have been called “The bleeding obvious: Business 101″.  After talking to a few other attendees at the lunch break the consensus was similar – a very very poor start to the conference (yep, this was the first session that we attended!)

The BEST sessions (tied) of the entire conference:
Email Optimisation, and Building Brand Preference through Digital Platforms

It was very hard to pick a winner out of these two sessions.  They were both very well constructed – Email Optimisation covered all areas where you could increase the performance of your email campaigns (not just about the copy!), and Building Brand Preference was the only meaty branding session of the whole conference, with case studies from big players like QANTAS, Telstra and NineMSN.

ad:tech Sydney in general:

The one hot topic I picked up on from the conference was “Lifecycle Marketing”.  Lifecycle marketing is about taking the maturity of your email campaigns to the next level.  Taking the marketer out of the driving seat and running your email campaigns based on user behaviour, not “It’s Thursday, time to send out the newsletter again!”.  Basically, from push to pull.  Not much content available online about this yet (no Wikipedia page!), but there are a few vendors like SilverPOP and Vision6 who are leading the way.

The other glaringly obvious thing I (and a few others) picked up was how poorly many of the speakers were at getting their message across.  From PowerPoint decks that used 8pt fonts (I am not kidding!), to presenters who always “flick passed” their questions to their “technical guy” in the audience… there were some very bad performances.  What amazes me the most is that the presenters were representatives of MARKETING AND ADVERTISING agencies… yet they could not get their message across!  Why would I engage one of these agencies in the future when they can’t get a simple message across to me, let alone my customers?

The verdict:

All in all, whilst the conference got off to a poor start, by the end of the two days I felt I had gained more value than the $1400 ticket price.  My suggestions for next year:

1. Make the speakers rehearse beforehand
2. A track that focuses on B2B, with some real case studies would be great!
3. Bring some of the content over from the US – there were some great sessions on in New York that would have been fantastic here as well!
4. Give the speakers a view of their presentation – many complained that because of the placement of the plasma screens they could not follow their own presentation (might have something to do with point 1., but I will give them the benefit of the doubt on this one)
5. Not everyone eats scallop cocktails at lunch – maybe get back to basics just a little for lunch
6. More money behind the bar at the party!

To the ad:tech organisers – I want to help!  If you are looking for a speaker for next year, leave a comment and I will get back to you!