Today we're hanging out at the first ever Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit (MAMS). The brain child of the folks who bring you Capitol Communicator and Potomac Tech Wire, MAMS is bringing together more than 300 advertising, marketing, communications and media executives to discuss high-level marketing and communications issues through a series of panels, keynotes, presentations and networking. Throughout the day a few of us will be recapping some of the panel discussions and keeping you updated on all the goings on over at Twitter. You can follow MAMS on Twitter at @mamsummit or by following #mamsummit.
The first panel I'll be taking on and recapping for you focuses on Metrics/Data. Panelists for this session include: Mike Zaneis, Senior Vice President of Interactive Advertising Bureau, Johna Burke, BurrellesLuce and Jodi McDermott, Senior Director of Product Management, comScore.
Mike's up first and focusing on growth trends, specifically in the mobile advertising space. Internet ad revenues hit $31 billion in 2011 - a historic high! In fact, mobile advertising has experienced the fasted growth of all advertising categories with triple digit growth year over year. The big driver for mobile advertising is that we can now grow the mobile platform in a meaningful way. The power of the platform is the different opportunities that can be embedded within the ad. Watching that trailer for Hugo? Now you can also buy tickets right from the ad, visit the website and even share it across your social networks.
Another big trend in digital advertising where Mike believes we'll see significant growth is in political advertising. Currently political advertising is capturing only 1.5 percent of all ad dollars but it is expected to grow to $10 billion during this election cycle - greater than 40 percent growth from 2010! Part of the reason for that growth and change is because with digital there is now a platform that can be incredibly engaging to get the message out to the general public.
Following Mike on the stage is Jodi from comScore. Jodi's presentation focused on online currency, the ever important impression. Per Jodi, currency matters and for display ads, so many are losing their value and a market where currency is devalued stops growing. To solve this problem comScore came together with iab, ANA and AAAAs to create the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) campaign. The mission of 3MS is to reduce the costs of doing business resulting from the complexity of the digital advertising ecosystem.
Along with need to reduce complexity by moving to a "single tag" solution, it's necessary to improve reporting of ad exposure - improve the visibility of ads. So how to we improve ad exposure? Per Jodi what we need is to move to a viewable or valid impressions standard. Move to a currency based on audience impressions (vGRP), not gross ad impressions. Because of the complete daisy chain of ad delivery, the reality is that 31 percent of ads are never views and many ads run in inappropriate content. If you're interested in reading more about vGRP and the charter study findings, check out www.iab.net/mmms or the white paper on comScore homepage.
Last but not least for this panel we have Johna from BurrellesLuce. The reality of PR is that it is now a 24/7 industry - everything is fast and furious. We have so little time to grasp our our audience's attention that it's imperative that our tactical activities really align to our business goals. In fact, Johna suggests hugging your CFO and really knowing your financial drivers before doing any PR or marketing.
As PR is rolled more and more into marketing we are finding that we need to be accountable for results. However, measuring the effect on outcomes is preferred to measuring outputs. Johna also cautions that social is not separate. All media is social now! Additionally, as we've discovered at SpeakerBox, content creation is one of the most important thing marketers and PR practitioners are doing now. However, Johna cautions that more is not always better. It's important to take an eye and look at qualitative as well as quantitative.
I'm sure there is so much I've missed so for more info on today's panels be sure to follow MAM Summit on Twitter - @mamsummit.