Advertising Week 2009: Highlights From the Big Apple

Last week was Advertising Week, New York City's annual gathering of Mad Men and media mavens from across the globe. Advertising Week brings marketers, agencies, and publishers together to discuss the issues of the day, from the latest advances in audience measurement to the ways in which innovative marketers are approaching social media. Through panels, workshops, expos, and awards ceremonies, Advertising Week provides a forum to discuss, debate, and celebrate the advertising industry and all its players. Here are some highlights from Google and YouTube's participation during the week:

87 cool things to do with YouTube & Google. Andy Berndt, Managing Director of the Google Creative Lab, and Tom Uglow, a Creative Lead in the Lab, took the stage on Monday to present 87 cool examples of Google and YouTube tools in action. We wanted to remind our audience that, while Google and YouTube create tools and platforms, marketers and agencies are the actual architects of their visions. Andy highlighted mashups and annotations, as well as experiments with data usage. Flip through Andy's list and see which examples might spark an idea for your client or brand. (Did you ever think Ohio could be a piano? We sure didn't.)

Rock on. On Tuesday evening, we hosted 700 agency guests at the YouTube Battle of the Ad Bands. After 20,000 votes and video views from the advertising community on the first-ever YouTube Advertising Week channel, six finalists took to the stage. For the second year in a row, McCann Erickson's took home the trophy.

Social Media for Social Change. Later in the week, we co-sponsored a social media panel with the Ad Council. Suzie Reider, YouTube's head of advertising sales and marketing, led a discussion around how innovative thinkers are using social media for the benefit of the global community. The panelists covered everything from Charity Water's use of user-generated videos to R/GA's national public service advertising campaign with The Ad Council, "That's Not Cool." In a week filled with talk about ad spend and metrics, this panel showed the larger, global potential for these new media. (You can view the panel in its entirety on FastForward's YouTube channel.)

The End of Digital Media? At the IAB's MIXX conference, Google's President of Global Sales and Business Development, Nikesh Aurora, took the floor to spoke of the future. During his keynote, he made some predictions: (1) Everything will be localized down to you. Personalization will be the norm, as in this augmented reality application. (2) We'll contribute to the creation of new generations of information. We're now creating new types of information that simply couldn't exist in an analog world -- and they'll all live online. (3) Marketing is the new finance. Data will drive intelligent marketing decisions across media. (4) All advertising will be engaging. "Digital Marketing" will be a redundant, dead term. In the future, all marketing will be digital, personal, engaging, and measurable.

Check out more highlights from the week on the "More" section of the official Advertising Week YouTube Channel. Hope to see you next year!

Posted by Kristin Kovner, Industry Marketing