Traditional media star of the ad:tech show

Australia’s premier digital marketing and media conference, ad:tech, opened yesterday with a keynote speaker who demonstrated his 10 rules for digital marketing in a very traditional media way.

Babs Rangaiah, the Vice President of Global Communications planning for Unilever, showed a series of the group’s campaigns for brands such as Dove and Axe. While all of the campaigns had an online component, most of them centred around that very traditional media form, the television commercial. The new Dove Men line was launched using the pinnacle of traditional advertising, the Superbowl ad spot. Rangaiah (pictured left) said that the next day the spot was followed up online with homepage takeovers on sports and news portals including MSN and Yahoo, and with the brand’s spokesperson, Superbowl MVP Drew Brees appearing on Oprah to talk about Dove Men. Rangaiah used this as an example of his second rule of digital marketing, “penetrate the culture.”

His other rules included “listen to consumers”, “create value”, and “be authentic.” Rangaiah pointed out that brands that lie to consumers online often get caught out, or in early 2000’s parlance, ‘punk’d’. “Companies doing best in social media today are those that got punked early on,” he said.

Following the keynote was the day’s first discussion panel, pondering the relevance of the ‘Big Idea’, as espoused by David Ogilvy and the dramatised on the tv show Mad Men. The panel, led by Amnesia Razorfish founder Iain MacDonald and consisting of Droga5’s Sudeep Gohil, Ogilvy’s Brien Giesen and Ashley Ringrose from Soap Creative, questioned whether media fragmentation had killed the big idea.

“You’re better off having 10 different ideas to hit 10 different target markets,” said Ringrose (pictured right). Each of those ideas must be appropriate for the channel, Giesen added – marketers must be mindful of how people are using the space that they’re advertising in.

Brands shouldn’t be asking for advertising, they should be asking for solutions, Gohil (pictured right) said. “The less control you have over an idea, the more likely it will become a big idea,” he added.

The panel concluded that the big idea today has to be something that travels, is sustainable over time and offers some kind of utility to the consumer – Ringrose cited social networking game craze Farmville as a big idea that could have just as easily been developed by a brand. “The cost to develop a Farmville is less than what [brands are] paying to advertise in it,” he pointed out. His advice to brand marketers was to “stop making ads and start making people’s lives better and more useful.”

Later in the day a panel on holistic data planning moved the discourse on data driven marketing a step forward by discussing predictive analytics. While many of the conference and seminars on data today still talk about it in terms of collection, synthesis and historical analysis, speakers on the panel led by Coremetrics’ Kevin Mackin urged the use of predictive modelling to anticipate the consumer’s next move.