Live Blogging Advertising 2.0

Steve Rubel, Edelman and Stuart Macdonald, Consultant are the speakers. They did a little survey of the room and lots of the audience are both "business" and "content" and online first (as opposed to bcast.)

No more "bulk buy" of eyeballs, so how do we sell or attract attention now? Rubel characterizes himself as "digital P.R." and led off with the story he has told before about going on mass transit and watching the newspapers change into mobile devices. Rubel predicts that P.R. people will become more important to businesses. [Rubel has just said "long-tail" about seven times. ]

Think of yourself as a development community so you can build APIs and think in terms of allowing mashups off of your site.

Money isn't coming into the arena. He sees UGC as less a threat to content publishing than existing advertisers like Proctor & Gamble or Budweiser. They are doing games and content that is "lightly branded" and you might have to give it a home on your site.

Church-State walls are going to be like the layers in a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, is Rubel's message.

How do people decide to buy stuff asks Macdonald? TV has been the great "brand builder" of the 20th century. It will fall off, but probably not fall off. So, how can a site be used to build "consideration and brand meaning" online? Then, how do you demonstrate that you are drawing an audience?

Will the gum company do its own gum website and then even go so far as to start marketing for other products. This could take ad dollars from content sites.

So, hold onto your audience that is out there now, so in the custom-publishing model, that might be how media companies stay solvent.

A legacy of blogging might be that companies and their branding efforts might find a "voice" and give marketers a platform. Marketers aren't totally tuned into this. There are risks in employee blogs and they are work. If they go into Facebook, they already have content, and they are experimenting.

The marketing rush and bust in Second Life was good because it was experimental, but it also generated offline buzz.

Rubel sees sponsorship being supplemented by Google adsense.

Question about how small companies can get into the market. Macdonald claims that "local" ads has been the "next big thing" for years and that no one knows how to do "local" right. Rubel claims that small retailers aren't web savvy and media content producer could bring together 16 or 17 local advertisers into a content thing on a site.

This is one of the ideas we are exploring in our work with creatingcommunityconnections and some of our neighborhood community development groups.

Ethnic media: example of Expedia. They saw no advantage in doing a Spanish language/US dollar site. The numbers did not support a second language site.