The topic of my talk is “Agile advertising”. For you startup geeks out there I guess you can say I’m giving advertising the “lean startup” treatment. For those of you with real jobs, I’ll be talking about how we can reduce the risk and increase our output for campaigns where  media fragmentization and hyper competition are significant factors.

It’s quite the opposite to your case study driven, inspirational, future oriented Cannes Lions talk, which is naturally both challenging and fun. One of my key points is to “optimize for now”, which is a phrase I’ve stolen from the always so brilliant 37signals.

It just seems to me that great advertising has always been the one that connected with the present, not predicted the future. The first mover advantages are rare in all of business, and even more so in the world of advertising.

From Burt’s perspective it feels great to have our ideas validated by Cannes Lions, the epitome of creative advertising. For the last year we’ve been working super hard to better understand how we can make technology and data driven decision making appeal to a wider audience, and it feels like we have arrived.

Although Burt was actually awarded at last year’s Cannes Lions, people told me I was crazy to leave the green pastures of CP+B to focus on building software. And now they’re using our products.

A lot can happen in a year.

And oh, I had lunch next to Mark Zuckerberg, who’s also speaking. Or not so much speaking as being interviewed on stage. He looked like a combo of Bill Gates and Tom Cruise in “Risky business”.

And finally, the outline of my talk:

Agile advertising
It’s harder than ever to anticipate which ideas and executions will work well and great opportunities tend to present themselves once campaigns are already live. The reason for this is simple: consumers are less predictable and the media landscape is more complex than ever before. With so many unknown factors to consider, the current, linear process for concept development and production is an increasingly blunt tool.

In this workshop Gustav von Sydow, Founder of Burt, proposes the idea of “Agile Advertising”, a concept for harnessing continuous learning and modification, optimising the workflow for responding to change, rather than blindly following a plan.

The best practices taught and lessons learned are based on von Sydow’s experience developing a leading analytics software for digital advertising. Burt also conducted a series of interviews on advertising efficiency with leading advertisers and top talent in digital departments all over the world. Just like these agencies and advertisers, delegates can learn to welcome change, even late in the process, and harness that change as a competitive advantage.

Agreement on what different metrics mean is key to put them to productive use. We are currently in the middle of writing up a dictionary for Rich, so that our users can better understand what they are looking at and make easier for them learn how to improve. But getting a proper definition of metrics is not easy, and looking at how other companies use their metrics is not much help.

Take Reach for example, perhaps the most central concept in any media plan. The basic concept for reach is very simple – as the name implies, how many unique individuals did our campaign reach? It does not include any qualitative aspects, such as how many times did we reach each person on average (so called average frequency) or how much impact we got on average for each individual reached. It’s just a raw number – How. Many. Individuals?

Historically, reach has been calculated in different ways depending on media, for instance combining consumer behavior studies and raw distribution in print and a black box combination of set top boxes, phone surveys etc. in TV.

When digital advertising came of age, the industry rejoiced since we could now shoot out a reach metric based on direct observation (usually some cookie counting scheme) rather than some shady statistical model. So in our reports, we get exact numbers. Very impressive. Makes it seem like we really know our stuff, right? However, this is all bullshit. With consumers deleting cookies like crazy and government regulation making it increasingly hard to record user behavior, this model is getting increasingly unsustainable.

I know, I know, there are ways of improving your data integrity thru Flash cookies, device fingerprinting (browser, OS, resolution etc.). At Burt we naturally do things like this, but since people increasingly access online media thru multiple browsers on multiple devices in multiple places, we’re fighting a battle that can’t be won.

Clearly, we have to give up on to the notion that cookies = reach. Stop pretending like we got the exact numbers nailed. Start talking about individuals when describing reach in digital advertising – not cookies, fingerprints etc. Until the singularity hits, advertising is meant to influence human beings, not machines.

At least for now, people buy stuff, computers don’t.

This post discusses that advertising money is spent where people spend their time. Reach a huge audience and sell your advertising spots expensively. The biggest events gets the most expensive advertising spots: CPM for the Superbowl is closing on $35, a 50% – 100% premium depending on how you measure.

So is not yet the case with the web. As Chris is saying in one paragraph, Google and Facebook are comparatively same sized, but Google brings down the house with +50x Facebooks revenues. The gap is even more clear if you start looking at the time spent on the site: Facebook users spend 3x as much time on the site as Google users do on Google. (alexa.com)

The key sentence in that paragraph is: “the Proctor and Gamble’s of the world will eventually find an effective way to shift the bulk of their ad spending online.”

It’s bound to happen. The medium is still so young. The Internet is today where the TV medium was in the 60’s.

If you look at online advertising today, the most obvious comparison is print media. Banners and Google ads are just print ads with medium reference (the link). In the 60’s TV advertising resembled Radio advertising – talking and not showing. Today TV advertising is more sophisticated: Entourage being my favorite with very sophisticated product placements: iPhone, Blackberry, BMW, Zoo York, etc. You don’t even think of it as advertising any more. Great ads even go viral online on youtube. Imagine that – people seeking out to watch your ads.

So it’s obvious – in order to rake in the big bucks online, advertising agencies need to understand their medium. And that’s what we’re working with at Burt, most recently by launching Rich, a tool to help Creatives understand which ads are successful and why. And we’re working on two other products promising to give creative agencies the tools to squeeze out everything our medium has to offer.

So while others are busy talking, we’re busy building.