Quotes from OMMA and MIXX

Emily Riley | September 26, 2007, 09:51 PM

I got to run back and forth between OMMA and MIXX on Monday as many did this week. I saw a lot of the same companies, although MIXX does bill itself as more advertiser and agency friendly. I can’t say I noticed a huge difference. Both events had a dose of measurement and technology and a big heaping of social marketing. Among the interesting things I heard in no particular order were:

- “In order to evaluate the quality of consumer generated content, you need real eyeballs looking at it on a regular basis. If you are in charge of a brand, don’t expect your partners to do this for you.” I would argue that a good buzz monitoring service can do this for you as well, but its always a good idea to keep your finger on the pulse, although NOT to make overarching decisions if its not significant data.
- “Leverage a small group of contributors to a UGC campaign into a much larger brand campaign by interviewing sweeps winners, allowing large audiences to vote, etc.” Especially if you are paying a pretty penny to set up a very involved contest on a big brand site (such as CondeNet.)
- “This is the best time ever to be a content creator.” As this was spoken by someone from a major TV network who was asked about how fearful he was of YouTube and other sites taking eyeballs and ad dollars away from him, it was poignant….I’ll give him the “free PR” angle, its true that those sites spread awareness of new shows. However, as for the “best time ever,” I’m assuming he knows a way to make money from third party sites that he hasn’t told us about.
- “Unfortunately there is still a major problem with quality control in the affiliate space.” As long as advertisers pay for leads without discounting for bad quality, I think this will continue to be the case.
- “Predictive modeling is the next generation of behavioral targeting.” I would love that to be true. If you have a good technology that can also provide reach, give me a call.
- “80 percent of publisher server data is wrong.” Spoken by Magid Abraham of comScore. Needless to say Omniture begged to differ.

The overall themes that panelists spoke about included the need for careful planning and standard measurement in the social space particularly, ways to target potential customers that cut through the clutter, and general fear. Specific fears included the fragmentation of content, loss of control over brand, and ad immunity, all major themes coming up for Jup in 2008.