As a startup guy myself and someone who likes to cover startups, I was delighted to find the Innovation Alley at ad:tech San Francisco. It’s no surprise that the exhibit hall and conference sessions are dominated by big brands like Yahoo! (YHOO) and Google (GOOG). They have the resources to buy exposure. But startups struggle for attention everyday. Most don’t deserve any attention but even the ones with innovative new technology and solutions don’t get the buzz they deserve.
So the folks at ad:tech is helping to solve this rather large problem. Innovation Alley is a new section of the ad:tech exhibit floor that is dedicated to interesting new startups in the advertising technology world. There are plenty of conferences that focus exclusively on technology and web startups but they’re attended largely by people within that world. You rarely find customers at these kinds of startup conferences. Industry conferences for different verticals such as advertising, healthcare, transportation, etc., could take ad:tech’s example and devote space to highlight innovative new startups that would normally not have resources to buy exposure to influentials and decision makers from the industries they’re targeting.
The startups I found most compelling at Innovation Alley were ones that addressed the emerging importance of social media in advertising and marketing. I haven’t watched television for a long time. Most of my friends haven’t as well. Not only do we not see mass market television advertising, we don’t trust it anyway. And while we begin many of our purchases online through search engines, we will increasingly get influenced by our social networks of friends, colleagues and relatives to buy things we hadn’t considered before. This is why Google the Goliath is afraid of David Facebook.
Peerset helps advertisers improve their audience targeting. From what I gathered by talking to some of Peerset’s employees, the company combs through social network profiles to construct anonymized data sets of interests and behaviors. The more you reveal about yourself on your profiles and social status updates, the more you will receive relevant advertising. As much as we’d like to believe that we’re individuals with unique tastes and opinions, we’re very much like the rest of our friends. We are more easily put into a group or several groups that share common characteristics than we believe. What I’d like to see is “data profiling” companies like Peerset and probable competitor Rapleaf use their technology to not only help advertisers serve advertising more accurately but to also just produce more interesting content. Sort of advertising by not advertising. Yes, that’s very vague and unhelpful but I think someone will figure out what I mean.
140 Proof delivers advertising exclusively on Twitter. The company helps brands target the right people in the Twitter universe. This is another example of the increasing importance of social networks and the opportunity to customize messages based on personal, yet public, information. 140 Proof claims that great tweets get retweeted. The retweet function, which was invented by users and not Twitter’s management, is one of the most simple, brilliant, and elegant ways to make a message viral. It would be interesting to get real hard data on how often marketing and advertising messages get retweeted versus “regular” tweets.
Brickfish helps brands create campaigns that get consumers to create user-generated content revolving around the brands. Many startups have tried to accomplish this kind of concept. It’s really difficult. As much as we’re becoming more social, we’re also becoming more cynical or skeptical. Consumers are trained to beware of blatant advertising. We might be even more cautious of blatant attempts to get us to help create still more blatant advertising. I’m sure that Brickfish has encountered resistance in some of their campaigns. Perhaps they’ll figure out how to systematically incent customers to sing the praises of brands. If someone can figure this out, I think they have a big hit.
I’m looking forward to the next ad:tech in New York. I hope they will continue to allow startups onto the show floor through the Innovation Alley program. You expect to see the big guns like Microsoft (MSFT) and Google there. There should be room made for pleasant surprises.
