Although I was there representing AdParlor, I also went out of my pure desire and passion to learn about the industry and understand the future of social network advertising. Here are a couple of my thoughts based on my experience.
- Social Network Advertising is a real business - The fact that this conference was able to attract the number of high-profile people that it did tells you that this is for real. Every single person I met was passionate about the industry. Many of them were CEO's of companies that were profitable and growing at a phenomenal rate despite being only a year old.
- The large companies are taking notice - and spending money - There was one particular panel titled 'Branded Experiences on Social Networks'. This included Scott Monty (Global Digital Communications) of Ford Motors Company, Don Steele (Vice President of Digital Marketing) of MTV Networks, and Deborah Korb (Brand and Client Marketing) of JP Morgan. All three of them were excited about social networking. Deborah discussed how JP Morgan was using social networking for recruiting into the firm. Scott Monty discussed the Ford Drives U facebook initiative. Most importantly, Don Steele stated that MTV will have spent half a million dollars on social networks alone this year - and this their spend will continue to rise in coming years.
- We have still not really figured it out - One of the underlying themes around the conference is that we (as an industry) still haven't really figured out how to monetize this social networking traffic. At this point it seems that the revenues generated from social network advertising will always pale in comparison to the revenues generated by search advertising such as google. There was much discussion about innovative concepts such as social banners and app-vertisements but it seems that over the next few years, the industry will be winning a lot of small contracts and perhaps large contracts from brands in the thousands - but not the types of contracts in the hundreds of thousands and millions until we can really figure out the correct and innovative way to take advantage of this social networking phenomenon.
