Burt blog

Display Ads: How to Bring the Sexy Back

A couple of weeks ago in Olso, INMA held an AdOps conference. Gustav von Sydow, Burt Founder and CEO, was invited together with Ted Persson, Founder and CCO at Great Works, to give a kick-ass inspirational talk to provoke thought and a creative conversation. The audience of media techy AdOps guys got to hear a talk about why the agency folks don’t care much for the digital display environment. And what can be done about it. How to bring the sexy back, as it were.

It’s a novel approach really - looking at the digital media from a creative agency’s perspective. It’s not unheard of, but it’s certainly been neglected during the recent era of digital marketing development. The audiences have been steadily shifting to consuming online services for years, but as long as the most creative people of the industry aren’t crazy about working on digital content no big brands are prepared to follow. 

So, how do we win the creatives over to online media? Gustav and Ted propose that media owners need to start focusing on the people creating the online content. They urge the media companies to work on their digital stand and raise the quality and the status of it in order to trigger higher creativity and a bigger slice of the brand advertisement budgets. 

For more see the video above.

Exchange Wire, leading online publication that tracks data driven display in online advertising, media buying trends and the advertising technology industry in Europe and Asia Pacific will be holding a premiering ATS Stockholm event at the end of this month.

Gustav von Sydow will be one of the speakers at this very first Nordic all day event on data-driven advertising.

Start-Up Day 2012 in Stockholm energized and inspired! As the Tripbirds’ Ted Valentin said - something has happened in Startup Stockholm during the last months. It is great to see and be a part of such a vibrant start-up community in Stockholm and Sweden! 

It seems as if all really successful, large scale advertising formats have three things in common. These rules apply to everything from the beautiful pages of *Vogue Magazine* to the relevant sponsored links at *Google.com*:

1. The format is a native, natural part of the experience

2. The format is simple enough for anyone to understand

3. The format is consistent across properties and over time

Given our startup DNA, contributing at an event such as Start-Up Day Stockholm this coming Saturday is extra fun.

The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship has put together a program that should keep us going the whole day. Gustav will be taking the main stage at 11.10 talking about the Big business - the happiness and hardships of building an Enterprise 2.0 start-up.

We mostly decided to share some ideas about what happens when you go beyond the first benchmark and you’ve raised money - I guess the real work only begins there if your goal is internationalization and taking over the global market:) We surely won’t miss the exciting Wrapp story or Johan Wendts “Marketing a social organization without a budget”. Do you have your favorites on the programe you think we shouldn’t miss - bring it on!

There will be a bunch of happy campers from Burt attending the event on Saturday. If you’re also there give us a shout and come hang out during a coffee break or mingle at Scandic afterwards!

Otherwise we’ll be tweeting away during the event at @burtcorp

We’ve been talking before about our Love for Norway and the affection seems to be mutual! Now we’re invited to speak at Gulltaggen – the largest Norwegian conference for digital marketing. The event is one of the finest Nordic marketing meet-ups, always attracting pretty impressive international speakers such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Clay Shirky.

Apart from the inspiration and energy from all the amazing people in Oslo, we’re hosting our own seminar! We’ll be talking about the things we are passionate about, and hoping to get some debate going. Our CEO Gustav von Sydow is holding the seminar on the topic of Making Quality Time: the next big thing in online advertising.

Are you in Oslo for Gulltaggen? Get in touch or drop by for the seminar or a chat over a cup of coffee afterwards!

For more info about Gulltaggen 2012 see video.

Some thoughts on advertising in social media from our CEO Gustav von Sydow:

Just finished reading a GigaOM article on the value of social ads (or lack thereof). Typical quotes being:

The point is that Facebook is a social medium, not an advertising one, like search or display. It certainly is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful branding medium. It is, however, a word of mouth or PR medium. You interrupt social conversations with commercial messages at your peril.

and

Can Facebook and/or Twitter manage to prove that social advertising isn’t an oxymoron, but a crucial new way of getting your message to potential customers? Billions of dollars in market value are riding on that question.

So. It seems our industry is finally converging around the idea that social media in it’s current form is sort of like e-mail, telephone, word-of-mouth, “buzz” and PR, but more structured, shapeshifted into one experience and put on steroids. At least in the context of marketing, and especially the outbound variety. Identification, payment, customer service, consumer research etc. is obviously a whole other deal.

We’re very happy to announce that we’ve been invited to speak at Eurobest - the biggest advertising award show in Europe that’s going down in Amsterdam in late november. It’ll be a joint session with Burt and CP+B and me (Gustav von Sydow) and Gustav Martner will be talking about: