Lessons Learned at Ad:Tech 2010

Mike McGinty and I went to Ad Tech last week to see what we could see. We spent 2.5 days immersed in all things digital at Moscone Center. As usual the rooms were cold, the food was soggy. But the gadgets were hot. For example there was a great twitter wall supplied by Dedo Inc. and a recharging station where you could drop off your phone. (LOVED THAT!)

But who cares? We went to see, and learn and be inspired. And at times we were.

The Volkswagen Real Racing Game  from Firemint is a free IPhone app that puts you in driver’s seat of a Special Edition GTI. It has all the bells and whistles of an integrated social campaign. Results can be tweeted, facebooked or you can rip a video of your race and post it to You Tube. It’s a phenomenon with 4 million + downloads world-wide. Better still, it drives those highly targeted 18-35 year old males to a take the keys. Integrating mapping into the application encourages players to test drive the real thing at their local showroom. They track everything.Test drives are up something like 56% as a direct result of the game. Not bad for an

IPhone

app. 

  
Levi Strauss is doing something really cool with their multi-channel Go-Forth campaign. They are showing some deep pockets (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) in creativity and innovation.

Jaime Cohen-Szulc, chief marketing officer of Levi’s brand and senior vice president at Levi Strauss & Co, presented the case study. He talked a lot about how the convergence of technology and user experience is creating a new frontier for brands and consumers. (I ripped some of his quotes from Mobile Marketer. Their recorder was on, mine was not).

Jaime Cohen-Szulc reminded us that “Everybody has the sense that their business is going to change, but most people don’t know how.” 

He tied it to the rapid changes we are all experiencing by noting “Important trends that are driving change include faster product lifecycles and challenging macro-economics, as well as the increasingly complex marketing mix. The reason why the Internet and digital channels [such as mobile] are so important, is they touch the core of human values—the need to connect, the need to feel loved and the need to feel productive, which can be really difficult to do in real life.”

He captured the impact of both the Levi and the VW campaigns by telling us “If you enact changes for the people, they will carry your brand,” he said. “It’s about moving from loyalty to advocacy."

He underscored the power of this by saying “Brand loyalty is very passive, but brand advocacy is about being active, not passive.”

Over and over again this was reinforced by case studies. When we went to the expo floor, where we saw the technologies and platforms (architectures in Groove speak) needed to advance  these changes.

Our big take away: you have to give up control to gain advantage. This is a bit scary, but it is also extremely exciting. I don’t remember another time in history when innovation was so democratized. We are just a keystroke away from …