I've been to a few ANA annual conferences and they seem to follow a pattern. First, a 10-15 minute montage of recent ads gets you revved up, then Loidice gives his opening remarks, you get a keynote by some industry heavyweight that usually provides the headline for the ad trade press and by the third or so presentation, you're looking at case studies, which are fairly dull.
This year stuck the pattern so far. I never saw Steve Ballmer in the flesh and as others have noted, he's a pretty compelling speaker. I also liked his talk about the media of the future. Someday soon, we'll be able to browse the Web with a device that's as thin and flappable as a piece of paper. Really? That's interesting. How much will it cost? Will you buy the paper like a newspaper or would it be more like a tablet that you carry around? Ballmer didn't go into specifics, but it's hard to argue with the central points of his speech:
- All forms of media are going digital
-Advertising will become more tailored to the individual.
- Steve will someday be able to to watch his high school's football games on his large-screen TV at home.
I guess my question would be why should we trust Microsoft to tell us what's going to happen 10 years from now after they didn't see Netscape and Google coming, among other things. That one didn't come up and as Motorola director-marketing communications Wendy White told me afterwards, the questions to Ballmer "seemed a little softball."
Still, an interesting and well-delivered keynote, although I was told by a credible source that Ballmer has given that exact same speech more than once.
After that it was on to Bob Lachky at A-B, who came out swinging with a refreshingly candid take on the Miller-Coors linkup. The $500 million in vaunted savings, Lachky noted, will come out of someone's hide and it's likely some distributors will be out of work soon. Lachky benefited greatly from A-B's stellar creative and the Wassup ads in their various incarnations here, here and here got an enthusiastic response, even if we've seen most of them before. Most of all, I got the sense that A-B's embrace of POP may be the great unsung story if its success. Lachky also provided the only real news so far from the show: That A-B was planning to release a product called Chelada that's half Bud and half Clamato (I know, eew). (At least I thought it was news until I found this. )
After that there was a break and then Wendy Clark of AT&T came out and ran through a pretty by-the-numbers case study on the brand's relaunch over the past 18 months, stuff like 55,000 hard hats AT&T had to switch over the new logo, etc. Clark's talk was news-free, a reflection, I think of that brand's recent tight-fisted approach to pr. Clark no doubt knows her stuff, but I think that telecom may be a category that's unbrandable and AT&T in particular is perceived as a faceless brand. And I don't think iPhone will help that much in the long run. I wouldn't mind an iPhone, but I'm not going to go to the trouble of switching providers. I figure the iPhone knockoffs will be reaching parity at some point. And this is not a repeat of the iPod phenomenon. You didn't have the service provider issue there and there's no correlate to iTunes, Apple's user-friendly and proprietary software. So, I think the picture for marketing telecom brands is pretty bleak. Prove me wrong, Wendy.
I think on the whole, marketing conferences in general often suffer from what I call the Jim Stengel Paradox, which means you want someone with a big a title as Stengel to speak, but then guys like Stengel didn't get to where they are by giving out competitive information in their speeches. I'm not really sure who would though. Maybe it's impossible. Anyway, all in all a decent first few hours of the show.
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