Digital Marketing Expo: Day 2 – Part 2

The second half of my day today was abbreviated due to travel. The first afternoon session was titled “Search Engine Advertising for Non-transactional adverstisers: What to do when you’re not trying to sell.” More than a mouthful to say the least. The session consisted of three very consistent case studies, Motor Trend, Nexium and AOL. Each presenter told the same story: know what you want to drive searchers towards, buy broad keywords and continually look to refine your message and metrics. The messaging was so repetitive I think I dozed off twice. Still good stuff, though.

The second session was called “What I learned from TiVo.” An actual member of the TiVo sales staff, Neil Strow, was in attendance and he brought a TiVo to show off. Mostly his dog-and-pony show consisted of playing TiVo showcase and “tell me more” content. Good advice on using BTS and long-form (not :30s or :60s) video in the space. My only concern is that I ignore the TiVo showcase most times and I fast-forward the ads, totally missing the “tell me more” content, so how big is the reach? But he admitted that reach wasn’t their goal it was meeting very selective, motivated, interested customers and giving them “wow” experiences. I still think they’re losing eyeballs with that model, but I’m not TiVo, just one of their users.

I skipped the evening keynote in favor of getting off of Manhattan and over to La Guardia while it was still relatively early in rush-hour. I was mostly successful but had to endure a terrible flying experience afterwards. More on that in the next post. Now: pre-cleaning for the house cleaners tomorrow and sleep, beautiful sleep.

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