OMMA Global Hollywood

So I spent last Monday and Tuesday at the OMMA global hollywood conference where I spoke on a panel that was supposed to be about Widgets and Behavioral targeting. This was a tough topic as both of these are still marketing practices that have yet to go completely mainstream, but the panel which included Michael Cartsonis, Director of Client Services, MuseStorm, Sudhin Shahani, CEO and Co-Founder, myMPO and Seth Goldstein, CEO, SocialMedia Networks did a pretty good job discussing the opportunities to target with Social Media advertising and try to come up with content that was helpful for the audience, which is what it's all about. Moderator . Trent Adams, Founder/Chief Innovator, matchmine runs his own company, is an astrophysicist and is also a member of the dataportability group - it was most interesting just to sit with him and talk about the industry. As it turns out both MuseStorm and musicane.com use Gigya's wildfire technology - nice to have it all in the family, and great to meet everyone on the panel.

The conference could have been galled OMMA Widgets - it was amazing to see the word come up in almost every panel and keynote. There certainly is an amazing amount of buzz and excitement about using widget as engaging ad units and it feels like they are moving well into the mainstream this year given the % of advertisers that say they are going to use them this year. Stats were quoted at 60%+ at the conference.

Doubleclick announced that Monday the availability of their widget ads product (powered by Gigya) hosting a session explaining how the new product works, and Ad.com also did a paid session given folks a nice overview of the lay of land in the world of widgets.

I think the fun for those of us in the widget space now will be showing that these campaigns have real impact, and determining metrics that are comparable to what advertisers are used to via rich media campaigns - interactions, time spent, and ultimately brand attitude/purchase intent. It's most exciting to me to be a part of establishing these metrics for widgets and proving real value, taking the product from experimental to a new key element of online marketing.