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Susan Bratton, of Maven Networks and chair of Ad:Tech, is on stage announcing that things are going well: 4,000 attendees; moving to Marriott next year because it's too big for the Palace; WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Assoc.) launched yesterday at the conference. Getting ready to introduce today's keynote speaker: Peter Weedfald, SVP Strategic Marketing and New Media at Samsung.
Wicked intro video from Samsung! Good speaker, nice intensity. So far he's acknowledging the facts around the Internet. It's a disruption. Things are different for a lot of industries and it's starting and going to affect advertising. He's fixed on the word "relevancy." How is YOUR business going to remain relevant; how relevant are you to the industry? It's changing and we've got to accept it.
He's now onto a position that says there are only three real categories of business remaining. Three legs of a stool, if you will. These are:
Content business -- making stuff that we can see, read, hear, watch.
Pipe business -- moving the data and content from A to B.
Our business [Samsung's?] -- "the first inch of the glass" for the consumer who is using the pipe to access the content.
We've interrupted the discourse for a plug about Samsung's business results and how well it's doing these days. All is growing very rapidly; capturing markets left and right from entrenched competitors. [Want to know why? Read Innovator's Dilemma. ed.] This guy must do this a lot: very good. Keeping everyone's attention with anecdotes and asides.
Now we've moved to a second three-legged stool: I think he's building a bar. This one is the paradigm for the information economy. The legs are:
Value Creation -- "you've got to have the freshest lettuce" because people are trading up for value not trading down for price.
Governance -- you've got to have the best channels and means to the market or you're screwed.
Economics -- "unionization of push and pull at the speed of sound" is a phrase he's used several times essentially meaning moving as fast as can be moved (for value and governance but not faster
I'm loving this guy. He just told the audience that preference marketing and getting the details on every customer (what' his shoe size and when did he last buy what brand of toilet paper) is stupid. Marketers don't need to know it, and it doesn't matter.
Not sure why it came up, but he's given us a paradigm of a sort. Against a "bell curve, he says on the far right, "complexity is the refuge of the unsure," and on the extreme left "consistency is the refuge of the unsure."