Work Different

These are live notes (continuously updated until 10:30) and thoughts that I may or may not edit later. I also missed the first twenty minutes as I had some of my own real-time marketing to do for a not-for-profit. Well, as real-time as we usually get, which is normally late. Digression.

Decided to risk a seat at Edward Snowden session to attend this session as I am a Malbon brothers groupie, of sorts (no one should panic–just intellectually interested and love Made By Many’s slideshares.)

The session so far feels more about real-time marketing based on geo-location, so more a little bridge than anything else. Using CES data on search, interest patterns at that conference were mapped over time.

Ok, now away from location. Next they looked at Super Bowl data and mapped queries against game plays and looked at what content people were consuming. Of course obligatory Oreo example, and Arby’s. Great AdAge quote: “Go home Real-Time Marketing. You’re Drunk.”

Slides:

What people want in real-time: Emotional reward. Immediacy & relevance. Snackability.

Innovation doesn’t need invention.
* Ben Malbon here talks about possibly even breaking things. Interesting and smart use of things. Like why not break a TV spot? (I could argue pistachios did?)

Search: Converse example of iterating between content and search. Snickers and misspelling.
YouTube: TruView and Burger King to contextualize content based on search.
* This one catches me because I feel it is similar to objects flying at you in a 3D movie. Funny once or twice, but finally not a natural part of the story and irritating again. I don’t want your ads right now. This is not what I am up to. I am watching a video about Korean babies playing guitar and advertisement is interrupting that. I am looking to have advertising work completely differently, not try to be part of my experience in a way that stops and interrupts in any way. Repeat: in any way. Advertising tries to shove itself down my throat.

70/20/10 and Motorola – hat game. Watch later.

Users and Magic slide. I am with Uther Pendragon from Merlin when it comes to magic. Magic may infer wonder and awe, but I far prefer Neil Degrassi Tyson’s “Question! Not ‘Believe'”

Usually after experiencing severe FOMO, over time I find the theme I follow at SXSW transforms. Last year I discovered the start-up crawl and over time my experience veered towards Nikola Tesla, the mad scientist of Menlo Park. Before slipping into Mad Science Tesla was a part of that world of magical fascination that became displayed at World’s Fairs, a movement of Progressive, Meet the Future entrepreneurs (think Edison, Bell, and so on). Last year it occurred to me that SXSW is the modern Worlds Fair, a place we go to try to early adopt. Twitter was born here as was Nike Fuel band. Light bulbs of the age.

This year on day two, my emerging theme seems to be about the tension between the micro, the packet, and lots of packets, Big Data. I don’t know yet where this trend will head, but was sharpened after listening to Julian Assange on power, the individual and data–and Leslie Saxon on networking our bodies. Yesterday, in a panel that was surprisingly without depth, Intel’s Maria Bezaitis talked about how she is interested in small data, not so much big data, in parsing the personal, coming from a utilitarian point of view.

Right at this moment (1pm) I am listening to a start-up, Shelfbucks, pitch at an accelerator session. The company works with beacon and mobile, setting up ways to upload your shopping data, parse it and target you with ads, personalizing your shopping experience. Like Minority Report perhaps, longer term, so not so new, but I mention as it ties into this emerging theme of micro data. Remember when Tom Cruise was mis-targeted in a Gap-like store? Anyway, at the time I felt the Minority Report ads were creepy. Do I still?

At a party at Incubation Station, I ran into Andrew of FourKicksMarketing who has a twist on this in identifying high-value customers in social and then advertising based on smaller slices instead of blast radius distributions of messaging. They use cookies with beacons on your phone to match you back to the right products, a “people like me” approach as I understand it. Their site does not reveal this so clearly, but seems a bit more of a Buddy Media-like operation.

So then of course…privacy. Last year of course privacy was a question, especially seeing image recognition technologies and, more importantly, demonstrations of what can be done with such technologies. One session was called “In data we distrust” another encouraged us to get over our fear if an un-private life. Julian Assange. Edward Snowden. Google’s Eric Schmidt talking about the fact that Google would rather not share our data (but “for financial reasons,” an executive from a Fortune 100 company whispered to me, “that’s wgphat they trade in.”)

That’s the obvious direction. We will see where this years conference goes, if I can make sense of it or should just stop trying.