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The future of TV advertising Conference

A few months ago I helped Justin Lebbon to sketch out the initial outline for the Future of TV advertising conference in London on December 11th 2009. Have a look at the incredible speaker line-up that Zero Point Media and he have put together here.

This is the intro I wrote for the brochure.
From a techie background I always love it when I can work on things that ordinary people can understand, i.e. when you don’t feel such a nerd at dinner parties. Well TV advertising is something people really do care about.
Here is a conversation I had a few weeks ago when my neighbours came over for dinner.

She’s a print journalist and he puts up solar roofs so neither are at all connected to TV advertising. I told them I was planning to chair this event and this is what how I remember the conversation going:

Her: “Hey Ben that sounds cool. You know I might loose my job within the year because our daily just can’t re-invent itself on the web. I mean we get loads of visitors on the website, but it just doesn’t add up financially [I’m translating from the French so no pun was intended - and yes there are two d’s]. Aren’t you going to be talking about the same kind of thing with advertising: I mean at home we just fast-forward through most ads using the PVR. Like with my whole newspaper, the web is kind of slowly killing ads on the TV?”

Me: “Well err, I think …”

Him “OK yes maybe but if adverts could at least be interesting, then maybe we wouldn’t want to zap them all the time!”

Me: “well …”

Her: “Oh yes and I remember as a kid, always being cross with my dad if we were late for the ads at the cinema, they were an integral part of the experience.”

Me: “Yes indeed personalisation…”

Him: “But wait Ben, back to the first point, I mean doesn’t more and more TV come from the web anyway so couldn’t advertisers actually know who is behind each TV set?”

I then gave up trying to participate.

Her: “But darling, we get our TV from Orange so doesn’t it come from the Web anyway?”

Him: “Well I err think it’s what Ben called IPTV, and …”

That’s a much as I can remember. There’s enough food for thought there for a book’s worth let alone a blog post, and that’s from a layman’s perspective alone. Some of these issues were covered in detail at the conference http://www.futuretvads.com.