The third and final day of the iMedia Agency Summit was packed with presentations on digital marketing outside of the norm and some roundtable discussions. Since this was a looooooong and packed day, I’ll use bullet points and focus on my takeaways to keep this readable.

Nielsen:

• advertising is not embracing Internet use as fast as consumers
• questions that marketers ask:
  • “Did the right people see my message?” — importance of data and measurement
  • “Did my message impact them?” — importance of listening (monitor communities) and asking (brand health tracking, online customer relations)
  • “Did they buy more as a result?” — intro to Nielsen AdEffectiveness

David Smith, CEO of Mediasmith, “The Medium is the Metric: Using Social and Other New Media to Track Campaigns”

• social is good for: graphical ads, real-time search, data (map of connections), consumer conversations
• how to track:
  • setup tools prior to campaign - take note of parameters, e.g. dates
  • keywords - brand/product, competitors, vertical, campaign tagline
  • plan for follow-up action
• tips: front-end planning, progress planning (before-during-after), damage control

Kim Walker, SILVER, “The Rise of the Silver Surfer”

• “Population ageing is unprecedented, a process without parallel in the history of humanity” - UN World Population Report, 2007
• in APAC, 2008-2018, ages 0-14: -6.5%, 50+: +33.5% reaching about 1 billion people
• not all are the same: demographics, culture, gender, attitudes
• APAC Aug 2009: 18.5% of all surfers are older than 50 years old, more than 100 minutes in online gaming per month
• homepage viewing time 42% longer, look at same content but for longer
• errors made: 20-50% more
• less likely to register (Forrester, Q3 2007)
• Web 2.0 technology can distract, but users embrace creating/sharing/community
• 55+ and older: 16.5 million on Facebook (fastest growing segment), 204 minutes per month on MySpace, 70 hours per month with 1.2 million active users on Second Life
• Baidu created 123Baidu with clustered search for older people
• degree of age-related: low >– importance of web as channel — what web is used for — how web is used –> high

Roundtable discussion: “The Social Media Effect”

• agencies need to invest in social monitoring, which will lead to sell-in
• objective is important, e.g. brand management, crisis control, SEO, etc.
• social networking as CRM tool –> use CRM metrics, no short-term goals
• every topic will become a social network due to “hyper-local” nature
• apps: games, polls, competitions, in China - social commerce
• many variations of the same engine, e.g. skinning, to contextualise to specific audience
• repurpose same app on different geography / networks (Friendster, MySpace, etc) / platforms (Web, mobile, iPhone, etc)
• app’s virality can depend on building virality into it, e.g. Mafia Wars
• social media is also paid media, e.g. Farmville bought ads on Facebook
• Best Buy - allows in-store staff to respond to customers through Twitter
• enable advocates, convert critics to advocates
• track sentiment of competitors, reach in different networks

Greg Paull, R3, “The Future and Getting Paid for it”

• ask clients what they want
• satisfaction = performance / expectations, need to address expectations
• 38% of advertisers cite creativity as most positive aspect of digital agencies (26% - knowledge, <5% - analytics)
• 44% cite lack of ROI as barrier to increasing digital budget (42% - marketing understanding, 41% - understanding agency)
• 69% are not cautious about spending due to current market instability
• new agency model:
  • consultative - e.g. Meikao in China: work directly with client’s CEO, flat fee, sales incentive
  • collaborative - e.g. Coca-Cola China: created own agency to bring people from different agencies together, no ego, common goal
  • creative - e.g. Mars: agency in China spent five days in US office, ran ideas of marketing director directly
  • cashed up - differentiate on results not price, seek out new relationships
• market your brand as if it was your own client

Balasingam-Chow Yu Hui, with Rueben Anthony, is representing XM Asia Pacific at the iMedia Southeast Asia Agency Summit in Phuket, Thailand. The conference is on 5-7 October at the Indigo Pearl. Stay tuned to find out what’s happened at the conference.