I love being there at the beginning. This conference was obviously the beginning of a tradition that I look forward to being a part of. AdExchanger could have taken the conference in lots of different directions, but they decided to make it awesome (at the expense of being huge, all-serving, or inoffensive) which I applaud.
The conference followed a TED style format where the speakers spoke for 20 minutes and the topics were only loosely tied together. Excellent speakers were blended between sponsor talks – the sponsor talks were for the most part bearable, and because they were only 20 minutes they were similar to a pre-roll ads before the awesome content the next speaker was sure to bring. Of all the sponsor talks, Adobe’s was by far the best (focusing on the Digital Self) and Facebooks’s was the worst. (Oh, they weren’t even a sponsor? Then what was the sales pitch about?)
Three talks stood out above the rest:
Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit and Hipmunk)
Alexis’ talk was the one I was most excited about going into the conference – being a shameless redditor and big Hipmunk fan I looked forward to what he was going to say. He said exactly what needed to be said to this group – he stood up and told a group of adTech people to “give multiple shits about their users”. Too often the advertising world (especially in adTech) forget that just because something is effective doesn’t mean it is good. With all the technology we build, and the campaigns and creatives that agencies create, we need to first and foremost ensure we aren’t destroying the user experience.
Robert Brunner (partner at Ammunition, creator of Beats)
Sitting at lunch, one of the people at the table asked how this talk was relevant to the conference – without thinking I blurted out “he essentially spent 20 minutes challenging the usefulness of the jobs of everyone in that room”. In the talk he walked through the process of creating Beats headphones, promoting them through artist usage, giving out free headphones at the olympics, and placement in music videos. They grew to a 100M+ revenue a year brand without spending a single dollar on advertising. This talk reminded everyone in the room that the world is changing, and to take a line from “The Social Network” – “You don’t want to ruin it with ads because ads aren’t cool.”
Rishad Tobaccowala (Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, VivaKi)
At Adzerk we are very focused on the supply side – we talk with publishers and networks on a daily basis. While we have good relationships with a handful of agencies on the buy side, I wasn’t prepared for how enlightening and entertaining this talk was going to be. Perhaps the best moment was when he attacked the notion of all this “valuable data” being sold to agencies, and described it as a pile of diarrhea when all he really wanted was a nice little turd of insight. I take that back – the best moment was when he said, “Your solution isn’t my problem”. You can take that a couple of ways, both of which I think apply – so many ad tech companies aren’t solving the real problems that agencies have today, and Tobaccowala is tired of hearing crappy ad tech solution pitches and it isn’t his job to find a problem for your solution.
(Disclaimer: I missed Eric Reis and the Microsoft talk due to a client call. They could have been awesome, but I will never know.)
The conference was intimate enough that you ran into the same people throughout the day, but large enough that there was a good diversity of attendees. The execution was flawless – great venue, good food and drinks, and cool swag. It was also a pleasure to finally meet John Ebert of AdExchanger in person – his high energy and excitement were exactly what I expected from someone who responds to my emails in minutes, not hours.
Can’t wait for the next one!
-James