Where the future of media and advertising intersects!

"We are all media, so we may as well get good at it." That's the big idea that David Pescovitz of Boing Boing and Institute for the Future will present in his Breakthrough keynote. As an owner/editor of one of the world's biggest and longest-running technology and culture blogs, and a research director at a nonprofit Silicon Valley thinktank, Pescovitz spends his days searching for signposts pointing to the future of digital media. In this presentation, he'll share his forecast on our new participatory culture, how we'll sip from the information fire hose, and the game-changing power of tomorrow's technologies of persuasion.

We are living in a thoroughly digital world and physical goods – music, movies, books – are disappearing and being replaced by their digital counterparts. Now cultural arts are immediate and accessible on sites like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, while the time we spend riffling through record bins and bookshelves is dwindling. And so, as the tactile pursuit of the cultural arts disappears, it is only fair to acknowledge how, in many ways, we were never armed with the right equipment in the old days. There was no Amazon collaboratively filtered recommendations to check, no metacritic.com meta scores to cross reference, no social web to tap for peer review. The digitization of content may inspire many people to read more, listen more and watch more. This is good. We will also use fewer unnecessary resources to distribute and consume the content. Less paper = less trees. But as customers lose the specific context of discovery – I found this record, in this store, on that day – how does our job as marketers change? What must we as marketers and agencies do to adapt to this inevitable change?

How does a marketer at a bleeding edge brand like Microsoft approach emerging media opportunities? Learn about how Microsoft evaluates cutting-edge new ad technologies and apportions its budget to new media opportunities.

By 2020, we will be watching as much video from the Internet on our televisions as we will through PayTV and broadcast. This video will be delivered to the living room over broadband to a variety of over-the-top devices including Roku set-top boxes, Apple TVs, Xboxes and directly to the network-enabled TV. Choice will explode as consumers gain access to an ever growing library of movies, TV shows, ethnic and niche content.

But the Internet and broadband is not just another conduit for the delivery of more video. This is a full-scale assault on the very essence of the television experience. While the well-told story will still hold our undivided attention, the days of passively watching 30 hours of TV a week are drawing to a close.

How we fill that 30 hours a week will have a profound impact on the business of television. In this session we will examine these changes and what it might mean for marketers and advertising agencies.

Apps may be the rage now, but in a few years apps in their current form will be on their way out. Furthermore, the mobile protocol that many of us have become comfortable with -- WAP -- will become a thing of the past. New standards and new ways of interacting online are reshaping the consumer notion of “The Web” and the way it shapes our society. In turn, marketers need to respond. As consumers move away from desktop computing and into “the cloud,” how must marketers rethink their digital approach and how will this reshape their marketing at large? What does HTML5 mean tactically speaking for marketers? What do you need to know about standards, platforms, and cloud computing to reach your customers in this shifting, Internet-Everywhere era? We are on the brink of something much larger than a mere update in standards. We are, once again, redefining the common perception of what the web means for both marketers and culture at large.

Location-based services are one of the hottest areas of the digital landscape with marketers of all shapes and sizes striking deals with the likes of FourSquare, Loopt, GoWalla, and others. These services allow users to check-in and share their locations with their friends. These services claim millions of users and engage users to a significant degree.

In a recent Grader survey of 6,000 Foursquare users, 99% checked in to a location once a month but 77% of them checked in 30 times a month. Clearly, on these platforms, the art of the check-in is not simply a metric of counting impressions but of one to engage as well. Brands such as Starbucks, Zagats, Bravo, and MTV wanted in on that engaged experience and have been first movers in this space.

However, the art of the check-in is not simply in the location-based space. The platforms are continuing to emerge with new behaviors around checking in to TV, movies and books through platforms like Get Glue, Miso, Philo and others. Brands such as HBO and Showtime have quickly infiltrated these spaces as well. And from content to brands, mobile platforms are allowing users to check in to their favorite products through applications like ShopKick and others.

How can a marketer make sense of the players and participate in a way that's authentic to the brand? What is the marketing potential in location-based services? Why do users feel compelled to use these platforms and how can brands leverage those in their marketing opportunities? This class will discuss user behavior on these platforms, case studies, opportunities for brands, and speak to what the future may hold.

TVs are uber connected these days and now come with websites, search, Twitter and everything else already built in. Companies like Roku and Apple TV are steadily proving consumer demand for convergence services and Netflix's streaming usage continues to skyrocket. Now there are widgets from Verizon TV and Yahoo! and more to come from new entrants such as Google TV.

Many of these platforms have their own proprietary portals with CE manufacturers and service providers jealously guarding the gates. Samsung TVs have different user interfaces, business models and advertising support to competitors such as LG and Sony. Google and Yahoo! have found a new advertising battleground to fight over in the TV.

With all of these different TV portals, application frameworks and video formats, will an advertiser need to develop separate campaigns for every device in the market? Is there any hope that a single campaign will be able get scale without an army of developers, videographers and user interface design specialists in tow?

This session will give you the lay of land for the new connected TV economy. We will look at some of the latest developments; see what the near future may bring and look ahead to see if we can catch a glimpse of advertising nirvana.

As the ubiquity of interactive screens has become a part of the daily lives of more and more people, the number of commonly-used functions has similarly increased. And many of those are built around the principal of finding information.

Search is no longer the exclusive domain of search engines as destinations. The likes of Google and Bing may still command huge amounts of our attention, but increasingly apps, social networks and tools for sharing content are coming to be used as “search substitutes,” for recommendations and serendipitous discovery. (“Search” isn’t even a very helpful word anymore.)

Going forward we will inevitably see more diversity in the fields of search and discovery – not only in the tools themselves, but in where they appear. And in the future, successful marketers will be the ones who not only understand how to leverage the widening range of search-related tools, but who also have a deep understanding of the complex behavioral issues relating to our why, how and when we seek information.

It won’t be easy, but as Churchill once said: "A pessimist is someone who sees difficulty in every opportunity, while an optimist is someone who sees opportunity in every difficulty." Successful marketers will fall into the second category.

Marketers have been trumpeting the promise of “ads as content” for years, but most consumers haven’t really bought into the notion, in large part because it has remained unfulfilled. Enter Apple’s iAd platform.

In this session, eMarketer senior analyst Noah Elkin will present new mobile ad spending numbers, size the market, and talk about best practices from a forward-looking point of view. He will talk about whether or not iAds are working, how brands should spend their mobile dollars, and how to determine ROI.

Big issues this session will attack include:

• Does the emergence of iAd signal a shift for mobile advertising? If so, what’s the shift?
• Will the platform push mobile ad engagement to the next level?
• Can a top-notch user-base trump limited reach on a mobile ad network?
• What metrics really matter for mobile ad networks?
• What roles will rich media and interactive advertising play?

When PepsiCo put out the call for PepsiCo10 submissions in June, the response was overwhelming. Of the nearly 500 entrepreneurs who applied, 20 advanced to a two-day summit to pitch their ideas. Ten were selected as partners representing the best in place-based and retail experiential marketing, mobile marketing, social media and marketing, and digital video and gaming.

PepsiCo is a company based on innovation and recognizes that smart outside talent helps spark innovative thinking within. PepsiCo10 is an opportunity to find entrepreneurs before the competitors – partnering with them to bring their business and revenue models to scale, while connecting and engaging with consumers in new and relevant ways.

PepsiCo continues to be a thought leader in the digital space, far ahead of a reactionary jump on the band wagon. Target consumers of Gatorade, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Quaker Chewy granola bars and Pepsi beverages in restaurants will start to see some of these pilot programs as soon as the fourth quarter of this year.

Join Bonin Bough as he describes how the initiative is pushing the company towards innovative technologies – including QR codes, social gaming, and location based services – right as they’re about to explode.

Not a day goes by when a marketer or agency isn’t pitched on the latest, greatest, hottest, coolest, best, new advertising solution. It can be exhausting staying ahead of the trends, and it can also be challenging to separate the wheat from the chaff, when there is, frankly, so much chaff. As marketers and agencies, how do you know where to place your bets among the plethora of new social media services, whizz-bang Web dashboards, and shiny new mobile tricks that promise the world to brands? Sure, we all want to reach our customers better and deliver our messages to them in the freshest way. But some new services can deliver and some can’t. Join us as we close out our Breakthrough Summit with a series of three spirited debates covering the buzziest new platforms and edgiest marketing topics. Our panel of judges and experts will dissect whether these new ideas are the real deal or just a shiny new object you can feel free to ignore. After all, we all want to know if what we’re being pitched is here to stay or will be gone tomorrow.

Organic Chief Creative Officer Conor Brady believes that the iPad is a major game-changer – particularly for marketers and media companies.

Which new and future iPad applications will help brands and media firms really make an impact? In this showcase, Brady will relay the following:

• The exceptional iPad applications that show the greatest potential – and a look at which ones may need some refinement
• Advice on what to consider before you build an iPad application – and how to plan appropriately
• Marketing strategies, branded apps and other new opportunities that will leverage iPad applications
• On the horizon: new trends and ideas that will shape future iPad applications

As new possibilities and platforms emerge, the way brands communicate with consumers is changing and new opportunities for advertising arise. Flipboard is a social magazine that is quickly becoming the popular way for iPad users to read what their friends on Facebook and people on Twitter are saying and sharing. It’s a new and innovative way to experience content on tablets.

In this session, Evan Doll, co-founder, will discuss Flipboard and address the impact the larger ecosystem of apps and mobile devices (such as tablets) have on publishing, media creation and the ways people interact with content. Doll will take the audience through some of the latest trends in app development that advertisers can take advantage of when planning their strategy for the coming 12 months.

Kraft launched one of the first, and finest, branded applications on the iPad. Learn the behind-the-scenes story of Big Fork, Little Fork:

• The strategy behind the app
• The decisions that led to the creation of a new platform that marries utility, entertainment and unique new-to-the-world content
• The way Kraft is thinking about the ad platform
• Why Kraft is determined to be a first mover in new technology innovation

Join Kraft as they explore what makes an app extraordinary, and learn how marketers can benefit.

Largely using test budgets, some advertisers participated in launch sponsorships on iPad apps. Sponsorships were generally sold on a flat-rate basis, with no guarantee of impressions. Large volumes of iPad sales coupled with significant product buzz allowed some advertisers to experience a first-mover advantage in running on apps in the iPad, generating press mentions and increasing reach. Metrics were sparse, however, and marketers are now demanding more detail and transparency.

Much reporting on ad performance within tablet apps is publisher supplied, and publishers have been unwilling or unable to produce detailed metrics in many cases, citing lack of availability or Apple policies. With recent adjustments to Apple’s policies, continuing iPad sales, and many new tablets on the horizon, the tablet advertising market is positioned for a period of rapid growth. Drawing more advertisers onto tablets is going to require greater transparency and detailed, 3rd-party metrics that digital marketers expect.

This session will explore the types of metrics necessary for the various aspects of tablets as a new multi-dimensional medium, the apps that run on tablets and the ads that run within the apps.

As marketing evolves from planning on three screens to planning across multiple screens, how will advertisers target, engage, measure and track campaigns? Marketers will look to converged offerings and new ways of targeting audiences. We will need to rethink content delivery mechanisms, communication channels and screen sizes. But the consumer is at the center of all of this. How do we as marketers learn to understand our consumers and deliver messages that "pull" him or her into what they want, when they want it and on the screen they want it on.

Next Issue Media is sometimes referred to as the “Hulu of magazines.” While there are indeed similarities – such as large media owners with the finest titles available in the industry – the opportunity and challenge matrix is quite different. What is the digital distribution roadmap and how does it mesh with print? How will pricing, advertising and revenue models develop? What are the technologies at play in the workflow, reader and digital distribution worlds? What’s working from a content perspective? How do the device manufacturers fit into the value ecosystem? Is there incremental revenue opportunity for the magazine industry or does digital distribution cannibalize and hasten the decline of print? How do newspapers fit into the equation?

These and other questions are at the core of the nascent yet rapidly developing world of rich media delivery on touch screen devices. And these very same questions are being addressed real time as Next Issue Media moves toward launch. Sizing and seizing on a once in a lifetime opportunity for the magazine and newspaper industry – what’s next at Next Issue?

This year the IPG Media Lab partnered with Hearst to conduct some insightful and groundbreaking research about what consumers want from content experiences on SmartPhones vs. iPads – including willingness to pay for content, expectations around premium graphically rich content experiences, content preferences, and more. Brian Monahan, EVP, Managing Partner, IPG Media Lab will share how Hearst is applying this research in the way that they provide content on the iPad. He will also explain what this means for advertisers.

While to date consumers report an appetite for premium experiences, the question is will that last as device ownership grows. Where is the high value for consumers today, and where will it be in the coming weeks, months, years? Come see the data and decide for yourself.

The exponential rate of change in technology keeps marketers on their toes every day. Go behind the scenes with Ringleader John Swords from Circ.us and see how a lifelong technologist keeps up on trends and helps his clients stay abreast of the changing landscape. To make things interesting, Swords will not prepare material for this talk prior to one week before the show. He will simply take a handful of headlines that reference advancements in tablet technology and dissect them right in front of your very eyes; identifying the potential marketing magic within.

Human behavior and interaction with media has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. With the advent of interactive in the 90s, passive “watching” gave way to “lean forward” engagement. More recently, consumer engagement online has spawned its own segment within the interactive ecosystem – what we now call Social Media. As Social has evolved into its own media segment, far more money is spent – and value derived – on listening in social than on buying in social. The term “online sentiment” barely existed just two years ago. Now it’s the first criteria for success. How will brands influence sentiment online in years to come? Leonard Brody has founded and sold companies in social media, most recently selling Now Public to Examiner.com in August of 2009. A globally recognized entrepreneur, he has been at the vanguard of what we now call social media since before Facebook sold a banner campaign, and all but invented the term “citizen journalist” by creating in Now Public, the largest array of local news gatherers in the world. With Examiner.com numbering more than 50,000 “Examiners,” writers whose content generates more than 19M unique visitors every month, driving influence in social media is possible now in ways never anticipated just a year or two ago. Entrepreneurs like Brody have set the fast pace of this segment in recent years. Come hear Brody talk about what to look for in the next few years, and what will drive this evolution.

Product development today is about taking a thoughtful and holistic view that considers the entirety of the experience. This approach means no longer divorcing UI, content, marketing and technology, but leading innovation through collaboration with many disciplines having an equal seat at the table. Gourmet Live, launching in the fall of 2010, makes use of social media, gaming technologies and practices, embraces a new program model and offers a thoughtful, multi-pronged approach to sponsorship. Juliana Stock discusses the process of developing a new experience and how brand marketers must embrace the iterative, adaptive nature of technology to succeed in the creation of a digital product.

The OakleyView iPad app delivers a hands-on shopping experience that allows the consumer to interact with Oakley’s signature lenses in five different outdoor environments and two different weather conditions. Tilt the iPad to fully explore panoramic landscapes and various lighting angles and immerse yourself in the activity without ever hitting the slopes.

Join us as we discuss how the team developed the strategy behind the app, and why it was important to let customers explore Oakley’s sunglass options outside of the standard retail environment, and why the iPad platform is a perfect fit.

The iPad is an innovative product that combines a great consumer experience and presentation of content. Hear how brands are reaching audiences within Disney/ABC's innovative television apps.

In support of IBM’s Smarter Planet agenda, IBM created a robust application for the WSJ iPad to help inform and educate users how current city systems can become smarter. Join Michael Dobak from Ogilvy and learn about the origins of The SmarterCity - a cross platform idea that moved through IBM’s communication ecosystem and onto the iPad.

Join Brendon Kraham, team manager of mobile display at Google, for a fast-paced and exclusive workshop on mobile advertising. Hear Google’s unique perspectives on how the powerful tandem of mobile search and display can effectively engage audiences and build brands. See recent cutting-edge mobile campaigns and get a sneak peek into upcoming mobile developments in search and display. Just as important, come away with an actionable, "right now" perspective on what’s possible in mobile today and gain new ideas on how you can catalyze your 2011 plans with mobile.

Consumers are bombarded by ads on a daily basis and constant media attention can oftentimes make us feel like we’re in a transient relationship. Does the answer for modern marketing lie in quick fix seductive solutions via social media or does it make more sense to invest quality time and build relationships through various marketing channels? Ross McNab, Director of Business Development at MediaMind, will discuss how technology can add spice and generate interest, while maintaining traditional marketing values that we are familiar with.

The tablet market is still in its infancy, yet the iPad and other tablet devices are changing the face of mobility — fast! It’s hard to believe that Apple launched its first iPad a mere six months ago. The iPad is now the most quickly adopted non-phone electronic device ever – beating out adoption rates of the DVD player. And the tablet market becomes more crowded daily with Blackberry, Dell, HP, and Microsoft all promising tablet releases by the holiday season or early in 2011. Consumer adoption of tablets is only going to rise.

How do marketers keep pace and take advantage of the rich new advertising opportunities in tablets and e-readers? No doubt every CMO wants a tablet marketing strategy, but where’s the road map? What are the major challenges to advertising effectively within the tablet environment and how do we overcome the obstacles? Join the Launch Pad Advisory Board for a collaborative discussion on the pain points and opportunities within tablet advertising.