Ad:tech Sydney: Keynote session – The New Media Mix

Ad:tech has been the main event in town in advertising and technology for 10 years now, running conferences first in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, then Europe and Beijing. After being hit by the tech bust, Ad:tech is back stronger than ever, with close 10,000 people said to have attended its San Francisco exhibition last April. Next city on Ad:tech’s list is Sydney, where the inaugural Australian conference will be held this week. I understand there are already 350 registered for the conference, and 1000 for the exhibition – good turn-outs for this kind of event in Sydney – meaning the keynote sessions will be standing-room only.
I will be chairing two panels at Ad:tech – the keynote session on the second day on The New Media Mix, and a session on the first day on blogs as a marketing tool (more on that in a subsequent post). Other than myself, the keynote panelists will be:
* Richard Kimber, the recently appointed Managing Director South Asia for Google, and previously global head of e-marketing for HSBC.
* Harold Mitchell, Chairman of Mitchell and Partners, one of the largest media buying agencies in Australia, and one of the grand old men of the industry here.
* Foad Fadaghi, technology editor of BRW magazine, coming recently from a role as Research Director at Frost & Sullivan.
The intention will be to create a provocative conversation, bringing together some of our different perspectives and viewpoints. I will kick off by showing the Future of Media Strategic Framework as a reference point, and to introduce some of the focal issues and questions we’ll try to address duing the session.

Social media: Is the rise of social media fragmenting consumers’ attention and making them harder to reach? Or does it make the total space of media and the ability to impact people larger than it was?
User generated and advertiser generated content: Does the highly targetted nature of user generated content outweigh the lack of control over content? Do advertisers need to become creators of content outside traditional advertising formats?
Format shifting: Is the newfound ability to shift media in time, space, and format a fundamental threat to advertisers? Or does it open up opportunities to reach people in new ways?
Monetizing attention: Will the targetted, measurable nature of advertising on digital channels result in a wholesale shift of advertising dollars over the next decade? What impact will the rise of advertising aggregation have on industry structure?
New distribution channels: How far can mobile go as an advertising medium, and what will succeed in this space? Can advertising be inserted at the level of the device (phone, music or video player, PDA) rather than embedded into content?
It promises to be a fun session! I’ll report back afterwards with insights generated during the conversation.