As I’ve talked about it previous posts the iMedia summits are the best collection of forward looking interactive marketers and innovators. I look forward to attending their summits every year. From Saturday December 5 through Wednesday December 9 at the Camelback Inn I got to share ideas, meet some great people, and of course learn a hell of a lot.

The first part of Day 1 was focused on agencies discussing and aggregating the problems we’re seeing in the industry. The group was broken into 4 topical areas. I lead a discussion on “things agencies should be focusing on, but aren’t.” The feedback and input from the group was amazing, somewhat eye opening, and reassuring. I say reassuring, because everyone across the country is having the same problems. It’s not an east coast thing, or a small agency thing, or a digital agency thing. It doesn’t matter where your based on the type of company you work at, we’re all in the same boat. Here’s a high level recap of the situation:

• Clients are often uninvolved and uneducated. They don’t take the time to learn interactive and then get frustrated when their vision is either unachievable or too costly. On the flip side, agencies rarely spend the right time or take the right approach to educating their clients.
• We lack consistency in metrics (how and what), process, terminology.
• Part of the reason interactive agencies generally find themselves in project-based relationships instead of AOR ones is they focus on the next project and don’t make the upfront investment to understand a client’s business, needs, struggles, problems, etc. But, at the same time, most clients don’t see the value in interactive AOR relationships because they view interactive as a “production” or “execution” driven medium…not a strategic one.
• There’s a HUGE speed/cost Perception Problem. Just because it can be done quickly doesn’t mean it can be done cheaply. A client doesn’t blink at a $1 million TV budget, but would laugh you out of the room if you presented a $1 million web site budget. Funny, in 1999 you could demand $2 million for a site and a client would say, “sure.” Why has this shift happened?
• Results based compensation is a major opportunity, but requires serious up front alignment on how to measure results. Too many agencies are getting burned because they believe they’ve delivered the performance based on measurement system X, while the client disagrees because of what measurement system Y says.
• We still have a dearth of strong interactive talent and we often hire to fill the title. It’s better to look at the roles you need and hire slowly.
• Amazing, but there’s still challenges with data standardization. There’s simply too many data points, too many ways to measure those data points, and noone leading it. This is a major opportunity for someone to make sense of this jumbled mess of spaghetti.
• “Digital Can’t Be a PS.” This was probably one of my favorite quotes. It’s clear clients aren’t listening to the experts, reading the real data indicating shifts in consumer behavior, and still make digital an add on. I know it’s true, but I still can’t believe it.
• Data vs. Insights. Agencies provide a lot of data, but very little actionable insights. Providing a spreadsheet with information isn’t good enough.
• There’s a ugh stigma with the concept of unbillable time. Ubillable doesn’t mean the time you spend isn’t worthwhile. It doesn’t mean the time you spend isn’t actionable or tied to a specific client. All it means is you can’t bill for it yet…but as we focus on cutting down on unbillable time we’re nickel and dim-ing clients and not bringing forward new and innovative ideas.
• We give away the ideas all the time and someone else undercuts on pricing. How do we make sure we’re being fairly compensated for our ideas? Ultimately aren’t we in the business of ideas?
• There’s very little leadership in the innovation area. At best we look 6 months out. This seems to tie back to the unbillable time problem and lack of talent.
• We need a common language to pull from that we use consistently. Is it interactive or digital? Is it CRM or 1 to 1? etc.

I’ll be adding posts as the summit continues.

Every year I leave the iMedia summit amazed and impressed with the people and companies in our industry. This year’s summit in Austin, TX was no different. Over the course of 4 days I absorbed enough information to make my head hurt…in a good way. it would take me days to condense everything that was covered into a post. With that in mind, here’s the top 10 things I’m taking away from the summit.

1. Real Estate Is King: It’s not enough to have a cool app or a great site. In fact, the best apps are the ones based on an existing community. Why? Because they extend the community from the mother ship and in doing so introduce a whole new set of people to the community.
2. Visual Expression Of Data Is Critical: Sure, you can have the MOST data, but if nobody can make sense of it, what value is there? I sat through a presentation from Trulia. They realized everybody had the same basic information, but no company had cracked the code on a great user experience. Their focus was on the end user; not collecting more real estate listings than the competition.
3. Display Ads Are Not Dead: In fact with enhancements like Yahoo! Smart Ads we could start to see a resurgence of banners. The beauty of the Smart Ad is that the ads are essentially built on the fly for each user based on a preset bank of assets and algorithm. In other words, we’re not showing the same ad to every single person.
4. There’s No Silver Bullet For ROI: We can measure just about anything online, but for the most part we’re measuring it in isolation. The holy grail of measurement would be a system that can cut across digital, TV, print, outdoor, etc.; however, there really isn’t a system in place that can do that for every client at scale. The key to measuring on the web is to define the end result and start determining what you can measure between the web and that end result.
5. People On Twitter Are Real People: I know it sounds far fetched. But, seriously, over the course of 4 days I traded a lot of tweets with fellow summit attendees. That lead to me meeting to really cool people, Adam Kleinberg and Steve Smith. Steve, totally helped me out of a bind. Using the #imediasummit tag I tweeted on Tuesday that I was in need of a blank CD. Steve was scanning the stream, saw my tweet, and offered to bring me one. He over delivered and gave me 2.
6. Content and Stories: What really gets people interested in what you have to say as a brand is great content and compelling stories. You can’t have one without the other. Nike has known this for years. It’s what makes their work so outstanding. However, and granted I’m biased, there’s no better example of content + story than BMW FIlms. If we really want our consumers to seek us out we need to up the quality of our content and our story telling.
7. Mobile Is Kinda Big: I’ve been hearing that mobile is big for a few years now. As an interactive marketer, I’m supposed to love the bright shiny objects. I started to get religion on mobile 2 years ago when data showed consumers sent 363 billion text messages. However, most companies have been slow to invest in mobile. Here’s what I can tell you. Back in 1997/8 people questioned the need for a web site, now you’d be thrown out on your ear if your company didn’t have one. Playing catch up online is a costly proposition and I get the feeling playing catchup in mobile will be even more costly.
8. “Viral” Doesn’t Have To Happen By Chance: If you really want something to take off you need a smart distribution plan. Companies like Digital Broadcasting Group excel in making sure your video content is seen by people beyond YouTube. It’s not hat YouTube isn’t big or important. It’s clearly a dominant player. However, companies continue to think that all they need to do to make something go “viral” is upload a video to YouTube.
9. Talent Remains A Problem: I heard it repeatedly from all my agency counter parts. As clients invest more in digital, agencies are desperately trying to find and retain top talent. But, it’s not easy, because there’s just not a lot of outstanding digital talent out there. Most seemed to agree that there was an over saturated market of average talent. But, clients don’t want average, they want the best…even if they don’t know how to use the best to their full potential.
10. No One Has It Figured Out: Companies have case studies. They have 1 or 2 shining examples of a flawless program/campaign. But, there isn’t a single company hitting it out of the park every single time. Those that have speak to 3 things: right client, right team, and right time. You need a client that’s willing to let magic happen. You’ve got to a have a team capable of delivering magic. And, the timing has to to be right; for example a twitter program 3 years ago would have failed. It takes all of those elements and a little bit of luck.

That’s it. Good stuff as usual from iMedia. If you’ve never attended a summit I highly recommend you find a way to attend a future one.