Ignite Sydney's marketing night went off with a packed room and some sage advice including the key to Twitter success, a futuristic dystopia in which advertising ruled everything and laser dildos.
Here's a small selection of the most insightful or downright entertaining segments from last night:
Marie Sornin, senior account executive, Twitter
Despite the infamy achieved by the likes of Charlie Sheen, The Hoff and that Kardashian woman, sex, drugs and alcohol is not the guarantor of social media success.
The three words which lead to successful social brands are:
Entertainment – Sornin swore people will share this content if it's funny and unusual, for example the Oreo Daily Twist.
Value: Make it so great that people want to share it, like Pay With A Tweet.
Utility: Make it easy and people will thank you and discuss it. Example was Twelpforce.
The brand which did all three? Burger King with its Whopper Sacrifice campaign.
Ashley Ringrose, founder and tech director, Soap Creative
Ringrose gave a vision of a dystopian (or utopian if you're so inclined) universe in which advertising really ruled the world, or as he described it, “a god”. Forget about privacy or public safety issues. But it's not so off like The Minority Report had us believe. It's all possible now, if not very soon.
Some of the scarier concepts he proposed were:
- Everything will track your emotional or physical data. Everything from your hunger levels, heart rate and how long you've slept for will be tracked for so you can be sold products accordingly. The name for this? Skynet Mall. Your DNA is your cookie you can't delete. Imagine you can target ads based on CPL or cost-per laugh. Or cookie manufacturers can save money by only targeting people who are stoned and watching TV.
- Your toilet can analyse 'raw' data which can then be used to sell you the foods you like.
- Ads that blackmail you.
- Advertisers can access your tax returns and target you based on what you can afford.
- Ads which can inject poisonous gas into your bloodstream, and the antidote is the product. But happily, it'll give you a two-for-one voucher.
Christian Bartens, director, Datalicious
Bartens' talk was essentially a repudiation of last click attribution but framed within his path to purchase of a laser dildo for his wife (so he says...). Underlining his speech was a plea to stop wasting ad money on search and to look at a more comprehensive purchase path. So who really deserves the credit?
“I finally decide I want to buy this [laser dildo] and what do I do? I search. I buy this thing but leading up to this purchase I had to interact with all these channels. There's a purchase path and it's not just search and that's a really important concept. In tracking, I give all the credit for that last search. None of the credit is given to all the touchpoints leading up to it.
“So it looks like search is doing amazingly well because that's the only thing I can actually track. But in reality, all the other channels were involved in driving that laser dildo purchase.
“But because I'm not giving all these other channels the credit in the current tracking model, I'm spending too much on search and they're taking too much credit. Over the years, that's led to the average CPC increasing and going through the roof. Not because it's effective but it's the only thing I can track. It's the last touchpoint. That is money going to waste. Money that could've been going to innovation that could've given us the laser dildo much sooner.
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