On behalf of MIMA, welcome to the Feed!  We kicked off the 2008 MIMA Summit this morning with a keynote presentation from Rebecca Lieb, former Editor-in-Chief for ClickZ, who promised to tell us a story about consumer adoption of digital media and the subsequent decline of traditional media consumption.

“Once upon a time, advertising was an exchange of content for time spent and exposure to advertiser messages.”  This is no longer the case.  Today, consumers create content and advertisers can too.  Advertising agencies are now switching to a more marketing-focused model that depends upon viral content.

Lieb provided an excellent example of an advertiser creating content.  The Great Schlep is an advetisement for Barack Obama presented as an extremely entertaining and viral video.  The creator of this content knows how to reach her target audience; she presents her content in her audience’s voice.  This example fits all three of the content criteria that Lieb focused on during her presentation:

• Educates and informs audience
• Amuses, engages, entertains
• Creates a story that consumers can spread (viral marketing)

Another example of content being used for advertising purposes is Pet Charts, a consumer-focused website that aggregates pet-focused content from other sources and invites consumers to vote for their favorite content (stories, photos, videos, etc).  The beauty about content driven sites, such as this one, is that they also support organic search engine ranking.  Search engines look favorably upon websites that constantly add fresh relevant content and raise rankings accordingly.  

Lieb dubs this approach (advertising with little-to-no significant media buying) as the “Jerry Seinfeld” school of advertising.  The recent Seinfeld and Gates commercials are successful in humanizing products to create viral momentum.  Consumers are so engaged by these commercials that they voluntarily go online to subscribe to subsequent commercials.  Note that the mention of the product in these ads is minimal.  Instead, the ads focus on entertaining and engaging the audience rather than hitting them over the head with product mentions.

Brands are now dedicating their budget not to media buying, but to creative and spokespeople.  Advertising is no longer about buying media placements that overtly promote products, but about finding a way to engage consumers via compelling content that gets consumers talking and only subtedly promotes a product.  As Lieb concludes, advertisers are becoming “storytellers”.  If you want to sell a product, you need a story.  What’s your story?

This past summer, three MIMA board members (Jason Kleckner, Julie Vollenweider and I) joined 25 other interactive marketing association board members from across the U.S. to discuss best practices, membership benefits, programming, organizational structure and operations. We’re not talking about starting a national interactive marketing association, but we wanted to compare notes and see how we can offer members more and strengthen the interactive community in each region. In addition to sharing some innovative ideas, the associations agreed to keep the conversation going via a message board and teleconferencing, and we’re also establishing a speakers bureau to share resources.

So…are you curious about what’s happening with interactive marketing in other parts of the country? Check out these IMA websites. Sign up for their email newsletters or just see what they’re up to. And if you’re traveling to these cities, why not attend one of their events? We’re reaching out to these organizations to make MIMA even better, but we encourage you to network with them, too. Other IMAs can be great resources for job searches, recruiting, making connections and building your business.

Atlanta
Boston
Chicago
Dallas-Fort Worth
Houston
NY
Philadelphia
Portland
North Carolina
San Francisco

These IMAs weren’t able to join us in Atlanta, but they are going strong in their regions:
Milwaukee
South Florida

If you’re aware of others, let us know. Email Jason Kleckner, our National Partnerships Chair.

As a side note, did you know that MIMA is the only interactive marketing association in the country to hold a full-day interactive marketing conference? If you haven’t registered for the MIMA Summit yet, don’t miss it. It’s your chance to hear amazing speakers, find out what’s hot in interactive marketing and network with over 400 MIMA friends! Sign up today.

I just returned from the Adaptive Path sponsored and coordinated MXSF 2007 conference in San Francisco. This was their first “MX” meeting, and it was well attended (it sold out!). There was a very large number of attendees from Minnesota. That was actually freaking a few people out, like we were going to take it over. I crossed paths with Mark Buccella of bswing and Bill from Room and Board (sorry Bill, forgot your last name and I didn’t get your card…). There were also like twenty people there from Adobe.

Anyway, Adaptive Path is Jesse James Garret’s firm in San Francisco, and you may remember JJG as one of the earliest advocates for “user experience” or UX, he wrote a book about it back in 2002. The M in MX is for “managing for the user experience” and the conference was aimed at a multidisciplinary audience of both agency and client individuals who are charged with creating/managing/improving user experience within their work, projects and teams. The bulk of the presenters seemed to be very product design focused, which was ok as there is decent overlap, but I personally would have liked to see more focus on both interactive and service oriented user experience strategies. Adaptive Path blogged the event and has some killer summaries. They are also going to be posting podcasts of each presenters piece. Check out the blog here, but I am going to inspire you first with some of my highlights from the conference:

Jesse James Garret

Jesse opened the conference with a really nice talk on what the whole experience thing is really about. He used the story of Kodak and the first consumer tech product (you click the button, we do the rest…) as a case study and dropped thought bombs on us like these:

- Biggest compliment that can be paid to what we create? I can’t live without it.

- Too many people are approaching problems through technology, others start with features. To be really successful, we need to solve problems by beginning with experience.

- The experience IS the product and business value + opportunity = experience strategy

Lou Carbone (our own local marketing strategy guru)

- CRM does not = relationship, it’s just data so get over it.

- Our goal, our objective should be to create value for our customers. Profit is only the reward for doing this well.

Caterina Fake (Flickr co-creator) interviewed by Peter Merholz

This was a pretty cool interview. Basically, Flickr was an accident. She and her team had been jamming on some online game called Game Neverending. They realized it was not going to scale the way they needed to, and in an act of desperation began re-purposing code and created Flickr. They were broke. They had no plan. They did no research. They had no idea, really, what they were going to end up with. None of them were even photographers, per se, but they were adept at creating social software and knew they were on to something with the idea of photo sharing. They benefited from an intense feedback loop, constant improvement and testing with real live people. Now, Flickr is owned by Yahoo, they’re all rich and have been on the cover of Newsweek. Dreams do come true for all you mom’s basement-working code geeks.

Overall, the conference was great. Really interesting mix to the audience, great conversation and networking, and the weather was nice. I had a killer dinner at Range in the Mission, too.