Where the Future of Media and Advertising Intersects

You've seen the stats on the market: Now is the time to invest in mobile. You've heard from marketers on the mobile road. If they're doing it, so can you! But how?

It doesn't take much to get started – you can build a WAP site in eight weeks, and an app in less time than that. So, how do you accelerate mobile efforts across all partnerships?

In this session, Ogilvy's mobile expert Maria Mandel will show you how to get started and how to expand your existing program. This session will cover:

• Strategies and tactics marketers can employ across the marketing funnel

• Terms and definitions you should know

• Noteworthy case studies

True to the name Boot Camp, this session will provide the basic skills needed to succeed and excel in mobile today.

With a bewildering number of tactics and options in mobile, trying to decide what to do can be a daunting task. Gene Keenan asks the simple question: Where is the money in mobile? To answer this question Gene Keenan will review four different product verticals with real data mashed up with current and emerging trends to empirically demonstrate where the consumer is spending money and how brands can connect to them. From this he will give simple, executable, and cost effective strategies that provide brands what they need to win.

Kennan will provide a simple strategy for mobile sites and downloadable apps – how to decide on what platforms to build and how to launch successfully, using simple guidelines that will put your brand in the top 20 of any application store. Once you have your site or app ready to launch, how do you promote it? Keenan will provide insight gained from years of media buying to help you successfully launch your brand with minimal media waste.

This session will transform your viewpoint on mobile by providing a simplified view of how things work, save you money when ramping up, and deliver real measurable profits.

Mobile is by far the most measurable, personal, and direct link to consumers ever created. But for far too many marketers, that connectivity has mostly meant predictable, text-based promotions or snooze-inducing banner advertising.

Some of today's most innovative marketers are thinking bigger, bolder, and far more bodacious – creating blockbuster mobile experiences that re-enforce and burnish their brands as never before possible.

• What are some of the world's most creative mobile initiatives?

• How do you take the leap from merely informational to richly experiential?

• How do you enable consumers to use your brand to connect with one another, turning your mobile promotions into social catalysts that amplify your efforts?

• How can you supercharge mobile apps to turn product promotions into fun diversions or useful services that enhance your brand's positioning and overall value proposition?

Rick Mathieson will present real-life examples of today's most creative and compelling mobile work from London to Helsinki to Hong Kong to San Francisco – and beyond.

Audi, Zippo, P&G's Charmin, and Kraft are all producing the next generation of branding by reaching out to their customers with mobile apps. Not only do consumers choose these ongoing branding experiences, but sometimes, as in the case of Kraft's app, they even pay for them. You can't get better engagement than that!

eMarketer's senior analyst Noah Elkin describes these success stories and the creative marketing strategies that made them work. He also examines what made other brands' apps falter. In this case study-rich presentation, Noah details the steep growth curve for smartphones and apps and the best practices marketers need to follow to take advantage of the "app"-vertising opportunities ahead.

At a time when mobile is set to take over as the primary access point for social media, hear about some successful mobile case studies that integrate social media from brands including Nike and GAP.

The True City iPhone app gives you the insider lowdown on Nike events, products, and locations. Users put their own places and happenings on the map and share them with the community, giving all users the chance to make the hidden visible.

Part of an integrated mobile and social media campaign for GAP Denim, the Style Mixer is a social shopping utility where users mix and match GAP clothing, creating outfits to share with friends and the app's community.

This session will show you how AKQA has helped major brands leverage communities to reach their customers on the mobile channel, and that you can and should incorporate social into your mobile campaign.

In the final 45 minutes of Mobile Boot Camp, the audience will break into small groups led by our board of advisors to discuss and debate the major opportunities, obstacles, and wish lists for brands, agencies, publishers, and ecosystem enablers. Topics will include:

• Need stats: What is it about mobile consumers that is so compelling for brands?

• Is mobile a platform, a channel, or both?

• Scale and unduplicated reach.

• How many platforms do you create for, and how optimal is optimal?

• To app or not to app? Will the browser win?

• What is scalable in mobile? What is worth doing without scale?

• The control that carriers still have.

Join us for this interactive session to uncover the opportunities, tensions, and wish lists of your peers – the very people shaping the mobile industry today.

"If you like this, you might also like ..." has become all too familiar in the digital consumer lexicon, but what about B2B? What can we adopt from the consumer experience to improve our business-to-business success? How do we surprise and delight our business customers with products that meet their needs on their terms? In a media marketplace where "context" has become synonymous with "algorithm," Turner Entertainment has introduced a recommendation engine for its digital businesses that uses full transparency to showcase its brand-building assets. Fueled by thousands of audience intelligence data points, "The Nexus" is the intersection of audiences, brands, and context. Taking a page from the consumer experience, "The Nexus" provides agencies and marketers with the power of choice – and the intelligence to choose wisely. No black box. No mystery algorithms. Completely driven by clients and their brand needs. Stacey Schulman will explore the business issues and inspiration behind the development of "The Nexus" and showcase the tool's use of data transparency and visualization to drive better brand connections.

Augmented reality (AR) has quickly become all the rage in 2010, but despite the excitement there are still numerous barriers to entry for consumers. Hardware, bandwidth, and awareness are all challenges for marketers attempting to take advantage of AR to foster consumer engagement. Cisco cracked the code to leverage AR as a lead-generation tool and create deep engagement with IT decision makers – overcoming many of the typical obstacles such a campaign could present.

Learn how the creation of this cutting edge trans-media experience allowed Cisco to connect with the difficult-to-reach, highly coveted IT decision makers.

Televisions suddenly have computer-like functionality with standard social networking applications like Twitter, Facebook, and Skype. The hype about convergence and interactive television surfaces several questions: Is this simply a computer and a television sharing hardware, or does 1 +1 = 3? Will the graphics and interruptions add or detract from television entertainment? How are these technology innovations relevant to leading advertisers? Seth Haberman will examine these questions while pondering the greater implications of mixing passive narrative viewing with interactive participation and what that means for the next generation of couch potatoes.

Reaching targeted viewers so they choose to tune-in is an ongoing concern for content companies. To overcome this challenge, HealthiNation, a premier health video company that educates and inspires people to make healthier choices, turned to the TV guide. With the wave of new technology going into the guide, it is becoming a platform where companies can hone in on and influence consumers.

Learn how HealthiNation and Rovi worked together to drive awareness and measurable consumption for HealtiNation's programming through the guide.

The explosive growth in connected devices, GPS-enabled mobile phones, e-books, location aware browsers, apps that use location, augmented reality, and a wave of acquisitions in mobile are some of the many indicators that location is driving the next wave of innovation in digital marketing. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM, Vodafone, and a new generation of technology and media firms specializing in location are creating the tools and platforms to deliver and consume content and advertising based on location across any device. The gap between the digital and physical worlds is quickly disappearing.

New opportunities are emerging to use location-aware marketing to drive consumers to physical experiences. For marketers, this means developing a new breed of marketing strategies, generating more efficient customer communication tools, and developing next-generation measurement models. This session is designed to showcase some of the emerging location-based technologies with real case studies, and offer early insights into the potential for marketers. Topics that will be addressed include key concepts and trends, different location-based technologies, an overview of companies working in the space and their offerings, new analytics, and how to “sell-in" location-based programs.

Media and advertising has changed more in the last five years than it has in the 500 years before. Now, the rate of change is faster and the changes even more profound. Search shifted the power from publishers and advertisers to consumers. Now edge devices – including internet-enabled TVs, smartphones, iPods, digital cameras with wireless links, and electronic readers – are shifting the balance of power from the center of the network to the edge. Yet most businesses – whether content, commerce, or corporate – still rely on a classic hub-and-spokes model relying on the digital levers of social media, email, and mobile to drive consumers to a website.

This is increasingly out of synch with consumers who now live at the “Edge of the Network" using devices, not PCs, to access content and commerce. “Edge Consumers" are forcing a fundamental reboot of marketing strategies and metrics for success. Peter Horan will explore this new media phenomenon and unveil the marketing opportunities at the Edge of the Network.

What truly stimulates innovation? The topic is studied and written about ad nauseum, but do best-practice solutions to seed and cultivate innovation exist? Some companies encourage child’s play – think sandboxes and Play-Doh – hoping to spark an imaginative “big idea.” For others, the culture of innovation looks more scientific and precise – think conference room discussions and white boards.

And, innovation drives success, or does it? Change and growth depend on inventive thinking, but sustaining innovation to create real value at scale – the only kind of innovation that has a significant financial impact – is very difficult. How long can we play in the sand box in search of the big idea, and at what cost?

Despite the obstacles, innovation happens – and it propels careers, companies, and the industry forward. We’ve seen nothing but examples of it here at Breakthrough, so we know it’s more than sand through fingers. In a collaborative town hall discussion we’ll explore how to make innovation real.

Glitch marries World of Warcraft-style gaming to Facebook – a Felix and Oscar online couple – but can CPG brands take advantage of it? Boxee brings the best of social media applications and online video to the big screen in your living room, but can auto manufacturers advertise there?

The near and middle-distance future of advertising and media brought you to Breakthrough to sneak a peek over the horizon. Uncovering new companies, platforms, and technologies is both a passion and a job requirement. But, accurate prediction of early stage innovations – the ones that will change our business – proves challenging to say the least.

Just think back to the surprises of years past: Facebook is just six years old, YouTube is less than five years old, and Twitter is three and a half. What’s coming next? And will it force both a shift in consumer behavior and marketing?

We’re here to help! Join us for a rapid-fire collection of six minute presentations by our cool hunting prognosticators – each sharing a company to watch and why you should start tracking it. They’ll face a team of judges with hard-hitting questions.

Then, when Breakthrough is over, our predictors will face the cruelest judge of all – time. Come see the companies you may be do business with in six weeks… six months… or never.

When you factor in the growing list of successful case studies to the reach of the mobile device, we see the birth of a legitimate marketing channel. In this session, you will hear from four brand marketers in different verticals, who are at various stages of mobile marketing. You will gain insight into the successes and failures leading their brands to where they are in the mobile channel today. They will share what they've done and how they got there, how they are making mobile work for their brand, what still needs to be done, and what they see happening in their brand's future.

In addition to brand stories, they will share what they see as the strengths and weaknesses of the mobile channel for marketers.

Mobile has become the most ubiquitous consumer device. It's our personal assistant, our connection to friends and family, and our portal for on-demand information and entertainment. In 2010, mobile penetration will reach 78% in the U.S., with 242 million subscribers. The sheer staggering size of the global mobile marketplace is reason enough to pay attention. Marketers are buzzing about mobile, and it is ripe with promise. For the past couple of years there has been a sense of urgency in terms of it being the optimum time to get into mobile, as the web was 10-15 years ago. But how do you leverage it for marketing?

There have been further advancements in mobile over the last year that will shape the way we market. It's not just about android vs. iPhone or admob vs. Quattro – what are the changes that have been made that matter to marketers?

In this session you will gain a holistic view of mobile within the overall marketing landscape, and hear how some major brands have moved investments to mobile – with good reason.

The buzz about the real-time web is well documented by top business, technology, and digital media publications. Twitter, Bit.ly, and Tumblr are emerging as mainstream brands. Facebook, MySpace, Google, and Microsoft have launched real-time web products. Seasoned venture investors, including Ron Conway and John Borthwick, are doubling down on the opportunity. The real-time web is hot, but the volume and velocity of data flowing through the stream can be overwhelming. Beyond simply “tuning-in," how can marketers leverage the real-time web to create value for their brands and products?

This highly interactive session will focus on unlocking the marketing value from the real-time web by using the three pillars of relevance – context, authority, and location. Attendees will learn, through case studies, how leading product and service companies are using these pillars and partnering with marketers to create uniquely impactful, engaging programs. Participants will discuss creative non-linear marketing opportunities using real-time web relevance filters and obtain a comprehensive list of companies serving the space. The goal is to equip marketers with an actionable framework to apply as real-time web relevance becomes increasingly valuable in the coming years. Come prepared to share and debate.

At long last the spreadsheet is dead. Measurement and metrics have entered a new era: The Age of Data Visualization! The spreadsheet served its purpose, but now data is being brought to life in far more meaningful and impactful ways. This session will showcase the innovative ways data can be translated into visual interactive experiences for consumers, brand marketers, agency planners, and media companies.

We've all experienced data overload in the form of multiple worksheets, pivot tables, and formulas that leave us searching for the meaning in the numbers. Data visualization can serve both as a presentation layer to help translate complex data into visuals and as a research and trends tool helping to quantify social interaction. Dashboards are no longer about being "cool." Dashboards satisfy the expectations for robust visual experiences as well as immediate data interpretation. Join Alan Schulman and Lori Schwartz to experience state-of-the-art examples of this new trend in measurement. You'll walk away with the inspiration to re-imagine your organization's display of one of its most powerful tools: Data!

Keeping pace with innovation is a pain when it's accelerating toward singularity (thanks, Ray). And at this point, anyone with answers is most likely lying. So how does your organization fund innovation? Distill it? Disseminate it? And where do you invest – or even get approval to invest? Renny Gleeson will examine these questions and showcase Weiden + Kennedy's approach to fostering and supporting innovation. As Jack Shephard in "Lost" said, "We either stand together, or we die alone." A word of advice: "BE the network."

The democratization of innovation is a turbulent process. Rapid creation and violent destruction. Many winners and many losers, big and small. Are there success patterns in the chaos? Ray Kurzweil definitely thinks so. He has been on the bleeding edge of innovation for decades, and his track record is something to admire. Kurzweil is an ardent student of technology trends and has developed mathematical models of how technology evolves. These models show how the pace of innovation itself doubles every decade. As information technology achieves new levels of price-performance and capacity, new applications become feasible and existing business models lose viability. The rate of change is now so rapid that even three- to five-year business plans need to consider that every level of an industry will undergo major changes during that period. Kurzweil will talk about the democratization of innovation in an era of accelerating technologies, and how this impacts business, advertising, the economy, and society.

With the monumental success of “Avatar”, and general success of recent 3-D films, the 3-D experience, in theater, at home on PC/Laptops, and on televisions is about to dominate your favorite retailers’ shelves and websites. But will consumers adopt and just how big a barrier will those glasses be? Why will this time be any different than the 3-D attempts of the past? Why now and what content is being created to drive the sales of 3-D devices? Is there a benefit to marketers to be first movers? What are some of the best practices that have already been learned in shooting video in 3-D? Come join Jeff Minsky, director of emerging media for OMD’s Ignition Factory and ESPN’s VP innovation, Rob Hunter as they discuss the 3-D ecosystem and the impact that it will have on advertising in the next 12 months.

Right now in mobile, there is not a clear leader in third-party ad serving and post-click measurement. Dart, Atlas, and others have full-service measurement offerings for the web, but not yet for mobile. So what tools are available? What do people do with those tools or home-grown ones to measure? How do you determine whether or not you have achieved your campaign objectives? What KPI matter? What other measurement resources are available to you? How can your publishers help? What can you track via WAP, SMS, or apps?

The mobile industry is the most competitive, fastest-growing space on earth. But in order to move money into the medium, marketers need to show their managers/clients real results. This session will identify what works today, the gaps in terms of what is needed, and help you wade through the options in order to pull together a measurement package that does as much as possible.

A round robin of mobile media planners and buyers dealing with conversion challenges will talk about what they do to track clicks and post-click activity for clients such as Cirque du Soleil, Loyola University, Marriott, and Nokia.

Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is quickly growing into one of the best ways to extend your online, mobile, 3-D, online video, and social efforts into the real world. Reach? Targeted? Relevant? Engaged? Addressable? Actionable? Check. All of this is in DOOH’s DNA, and the reason it's the second-fastest growing medium.

In this presentation, Rob Gorrie, president of ADCENTRICITY, will highlight relevant case studies with brands leveraging the DOOH medium and discuss what the future holds for the space. What's next in DOOH? Participation, not interaction. Relevance, not reach. Learn how to integrate DOOH into your media plan today.

Smart brands like Star Wars, Miley Cyrus, and Hot Pockets are integrating their brands into a new category of social networks like Meez, where users dress their three dimensional avatars in branded clothing, morph their personas into fictional characters, and eat branded food. This past year has also seen an explosion of this type of advertising on applications on Facebook, where social games and brands team up for campaigns with massive scale. Learn how “social endorsement” has become the new currency for marketers looking to engage customers and recruit new fans.

Marketers want first to market opportunities – they want out of the box, big ideas that will deliver high impact for their brands. Advertising innovation in today’s media landscape requires a deep understanding of emerging platforms and new technology partners to leverage. Jeff Minsky will showcase the OMD Ignition Factory approach to delivering first-to-market advertising opportunities with multi-platform and multi-brand integration. How do Entertainment Weekly, Pepsi, and CBS come together in a single advertising execution that is a “wow” and works for all brands? Minsky will show you, and he'll share other brands' advertising success in emerging platforms.

Cross-channel. Mobile communities. Augmented reality. Ubiquitous computing. Amid the buzz, we are seeing evidence that all media is getting ready for a digital hyper-drive, fuelled by consumer desire for entertainment-on-demand and always-on-communication. Hidden within this emerging world is the utopian promise of addressable advertising – across all media. Yet set against a backdrop of big brands trending to bring elements of control in-house, Dean Donaldson, director of digital experience at Eyeblaster, asks, “Is media technology ready for the future or does reality reveal we are locked in the past?” And he challenges the notion of the purely digital agency.

Did you know?

• Pepsi ditched their Super Bowl Ads (a 23-year old staple – over $140M dollar total investment) in favor of a $20M social media campaign

• 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day

• Twitter grew 1,448% annually, from 1.2 million unique visitors in 2008 to 18.2 million in 2009

So what does this mean for your brand? First, it means you have to have a Facebook Page and a Twitter account. But, it’s not as simple as “build it and they will come.” You need to attract fans with engaging content and start conversations in which fans will participate. Second, you need to also “activate” those fans with exclusive content and offers on which they will act. By doing so, you effectively harness the power of social marketing to make social work for your brand.

Come to the “Get Serious about Social Marketing Spotlight Presentation” and learn how to create and implement smart social media strategies.

And if this isn’t enough just wait to see the great prizes you can win and check your conference bag for a way to earn a prize just for attending!

The media buy of the future will necessitate the next level of maturity within the advertising ecosystem. Buys are already starting to require more skill and talent to negotiate and close the deal, a deeper understanding of audience engagement, and a well-oiled operation behind the scenes helping to manipulate the levers that execute the ad campaign.

In the future, larger media buys will be initiated from the ad agencies that seek integrated syndication – fusion of all digital media types: display, mobile, video, and social media. In order to keep up, publishers will need to streamline their ad sales teams, re-think product packaging, and enhance the level of service they provide – making all of these components feel integrated.

Please join Operative founder, Lorne Brown, and agency leaders on Monday morning as we discuss what agencies will need from publishers to be successful with their brands in the future. Furthermore, get the inside scoop on how to keep agencies coming back to buy from you again!

Operative is in the business of helping media companies make money easier through the deployment of one system to run your business. Companies like NBCU, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters all run their businesses on Operative.

Join us as we extract insights and opinions that help publishers invoke change and find new top line revenue growth.

This month, lions and tigers and bears are just the beginning … get ready for the launch of the new cable network Nat Geo WILD on Monday, March 29. For more than 30 years, National Geographic has been the leader in wildlife programming. Now, Nat Geo WILD is giving the animal kingdom center stage as it features rebellious monkeys, secret shark coves, giant octopus, and the work of some of the world’s foremost explorers and animal scientists. Launching in both standard and high definition, Nat Geo WILD will traverse the globe to bring viewers the most extraordinary stories of our natural world and intimate encounters with nature’s ferocious fighters and gentle creatures of land, sea, and air.

One of the faces of this new network is Casey Anderson, a wildlife naturalist whose best friend is a six-foot, 900-pound grizzly bear named Brutus. You know you’re an animal magnet when the best man in your wedding (to actress Missi Pyle) is a grizzly bear. Now, this unlikely Ben Affleck/Matt Damon-esque duo is featured in a new Nat Geo Wild series called Expedition Wild.

Casey joins us at iMedia to tell us all about the new network, his grizzly best friend Brutus, and exciting opportunities for you!

The members of Company of Thieves are collectively grounded, and well-versed in the challenges the world faces today. This is a scary time for a lot of people, government-wise, art-wise, and especially business-wise, says singer Genevieve Schatz. People seem to be very held back in what they're willing to invest in personally, emotionally, and financially. But at the same time, there's a new, gutsy energy coming out right now, almost a generational thing. Today's youth, and to some extent their parents, are really wanting a change, and there's a feeling that we're at the edge of big change right now. Great art always rises up when change is going on. These exciting - if uncertain - times are reflected in the eclectic sound of Ordinary Riches, an album that moves effortlessly from the seemingly jaunty, piano-led "In Passing" and the catchy pop tones of "Pressure" to the arena-ready sing-along chorus of "New Letters" and the Jonny Greenwood-ish guitar figures on "Old Letters." They are erudite without being pretentious, hooky without being saccharine, and plainly dedicated to its ideals, Company of Thieves stunning debut album Ordinary Riches reveals a band very much of its time. It's true what they say about new bands, that you wait your whole life to write your first record, says guitarist Marc Walloch. This is the sound of us piecing together things we wanted to try out, playing different parts to see what happened.