IAB Innovation Days @ Internet Week

Summary
From the IAB Mobile Marketplace conference held in New York in June 2010, Geoffrey Precourt reports on the session held by Ian Schafer, the founder/ceo of interactive agency, Deep Focus. His talk covered the strategy carried out for Microsoft to promote its "decision" engine, Bing, to football fans during the World Cup 2010. Over a very short development period, a partnership was forged with social media platform, Foursquare, and urban recommendation newsletter, Thrillist, to provide bars to watch matches in, sorted by country-by-country loyalties. Shafer estimated that the Bing program outperformed other Foursquare World Cup promotions by anywhere between 75 and 150 percent.

Summary
In a keynote interview at the Interactive Advertising Bureau Innovation Days conference, Lloyd Braun discussed the partnership of television and digital. He introduced the websites Wonderwall and Glo, despite the absence of digital energy and resources in Hollywood. Braun has taken advantage of this situation and is now focusing on display advertising. He promotes the benefits of content and good design, citing the example of Apple products, iPod and iTunes. He also expects people toe start paying for content.

Summary
How can major global media companies work with a variety of technology partners with so many different options and choices? The question was posed by Lisa Valentino, ESPN vp/digital and mobile ad sales, at the IAB Innovation Days conference held in New York. With the FIFA World Cup 2010 came a set of challenges over how to be able to deliver the content in any format that the consumer would demand it. Of some 86 million American video streams, ESPN has a 32-percent share of all streaming minutes. To deliver content, for video, ESPN starts from a core that works on TV screens, PCs, mobile devices, iPads and the upcoming spate of comparable tablets. Then variations mandated for the web page, the mobile page, and the printed page of ESPN the Magazine.

Summary
At the IAB Innovation Days conference in New York, Tim Armstrong, ceo/chairman of AOL suggested that online advertising is growing faster than many people think. He discusses how AOL has moved from essentially being a portal to providing its own content and following AOL's loss in popularity, how it has also moved to not thinking about the competition. Instead it is focusing on providing credible content and looking to how it is distributed - on a more person-to-person basis.

Summary
At the opening of the IAB's Innovation Days at Internet Week in New York, Randall Rothenberg warned that too often, human nature is forgotten in the face of technology. Championing content, Rothenberg also recognised that new technology poses new challenges to the industry and states that convergence has happened. He also announced the IAB's new Tablet Task Force, who are intended to discuss how to drive sustainable growth for tablet and e-reader advertising.

Summary
Speaking at the IAB Innovation Days conference in New York, Tolman Geffs, co-president of The Jordan, Edmiston Group, delivered a message to an audience buoyed by a recovering economy. Geffs confirmed that media-and-acquisition activity has rebounded but has changed nature, there is more activity in 2010 but the transactions are smaller. Growth is expected to continue and is mostly due to marketplace changes in how inventory is processed and sold.