A Tale of Two Ad:Techs — NY and Shanghai

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, The Matrix of ancient Greece, suggests that the totality of our perceptions conspire to divert us from larger truths and my experience at ad:tech New York would support its argument. Garish memories of catchy doo-dads and occasional run-ins with kooky characters once again defined the event as I experienced it while blotting out the greater reality of the event. I’m not saying I spent two full days in a surreal funhouse, but for the rest of the week I was calculating the shame/profit ratio that would ensue if I were to start wearing bright suits festooned with punctuation marks. I needed some time to dissociate from the glitz before I could go back and start tackling relatively mundane issues, such as how today’s interactive trends will influence tomorrow’s advertising dollar.

And weren’t we all giddy, though? Prior to November’s grand affair at the New York Hilton when I wasn’t thinking about which cocktail socials were lined up for which campaigns, I was focused on the impeding attack of some 7,000 attention starved conventioneers. I, along with the dozen-plus scheduled to work the conference from ICMediaDirect.com, ran through what questions we’d hear and, wisely, “what do you guys do?” was the number one question anticipated. We were a conference sponsor and prominently tabled across the foyer from the registration desks so it was imperative for us to be well-prepared in response to all queries of our company’s business. And we were.

Our central positioning during ad:tech allowed me to greet the seemingly endless crowd marching back and forth from the featured speaker venues and the exhibitor floors. I hear that total attendance was north of 8,300. But even if that figure was doubled, I doubt that I could have made any more contacts — it was simply that busy. It felt like no locale mattered more to my profession than where I was then; I mean, were we not in New York City participating in the biggest and baddest convention in the interactive field? I can’t speak for others, but at times it was easy for me to forget that I was merely doing business and not changing the planet.

Diana Lee, ICMediaDirect.com’s VP of Business Development, not only coordinated the New York event for us, but was scheduled to leave at the week’s end to run our operation at the inaugural convention ad:tech Shanghai, which we also sponsored. All that this meant for me, really, was that someone was getting to go on an extended trip to China, lucky her. As far as Shanghai itself was concerned; well, come on, someone’s got to slog through the interactive backwaters, right? A fluent speaker of Mandarin and an outgoing marketing pro, Diana was the ideal candidate for such a foray.

I sat with Diana to recount her trip after she returned to the ICMediaDirect.com’s office in the Empire State Building. The level of sophistication presented at ad:tech Shanghai genuinely surprised her and she remarked that the Chinese people will certainly continue to immerse themselves online.

China’s economic ministers must have recognized that their people, like Western consumers, value innovative technology and appreciate choice. The economic boon generated by the resulting consumerism has helped to entice the government to cautiously explore foreign investment over these past few years.

And nowhere will this impact be more dramatically felt than in interactive marketing. The advertising potential for China’s online population is simply more attractive than any other market. Consider this, roughly 250 million Chinese are already online (more than ten times the number 5 years ago) in an economy that’s been growing steadily at 8-9%. This enormous audience, which will parallel the total census numbers of the US by 2008, represents only the one-fifth of their population on the Internet. Let’s recap. In two more years the number of Chinese consumers online will equal the total number of people in the US.

If there is a place to invest in business advertising, it is online in China.

In fact, our dutiful representative told me that in China, search engine marketing is the same hot ticket that it has been here recently. Although shouldn’t have surprised me, it momentarily did. Maybe I was thinking that the Chinese interactive entities, being relatively late entrants into an evolving game, owe it to the world to be heavily immersed in a few fruitless tactics, like keyword stuffing for instance, before adopting today’s darlings.

My short-sightedness has no logic, folks, except provincialism. And from such a mindset leaks notions that one ad:tech event might be of a higher inherent tech relevance than another. I was wrong. The Internet and its applications are truly universal and what matters most is who’s using it and how, not where people gather to gab about it.

Beijing’s history of disinterest in consumer choice for its people hasn’t ended without its ramifications. The Chinese, who do not share our storied and anesthetizing love affair with consumer-targeted advertiser-supported television, are more open than we are to utilizing the Internet as a primary source of information, like news. In fact, many believe that the Chinese are starting to prefer the Internet as a primary source of daily news. Obviously, many of those reading these words also feel the same way, but let’s remember that much of our country is falling all over itself in speculation over who the next anchor will be at CBS. I guess this matters to some people.

While internet advertising monies continue in a ‘break-out’ mode, the reports of aggregate advertising revenues in “traditional” mediums in China have leveled off to the rates of a maturing business. We are all given to think, perhaps, that technology’s march is sure, certain and inevitable. But we should lend this particular trend in China its own context – the Chinese experience just might be a glimpse into our own future. In a scenario where advertiser-driven television and the Internet all came down the pike about the same time, the Chinese may be indicating that they value the internet the most. Granted, they may still be taking their “baby steps” into the interactive marketplace, but we in the West are the ones with more traditional advertising baggage to shed due to our comfort level with the **** tube. As China matures the day may come when their inclusion of the Internet into everyday life will be our model to emulate. Now, that’s hot.