Thoughts from IAB MIXX Conference
I had the opportunity to attend the IAB MIXX Conference and Awards ceremony on Monday and Tuesday of this week.
First off, I’m glad that OMMA and MIXX figured out a way to hold their annual New York conferences on different days. MIXX managed to finagle having theirs during the first two days of Advertising Week which was fantastically convenient.
As with last year’s conference, I found the sessions interesting and educational. Two that really stood out were Young-Bean Song from Atlas Institute / Microsoft Advertising who spoke about moving to “engagement mapping” as a superior approach over click-tracking for online media optimization and Geoff Ramsey from eMarketer and Jeffrey Cole from USC’s Annenberg Center for the Digital Future who gave some pretty bold predictions about Facebook’s inevitable fall and the coming age of mobile.
As someone who has been in the agency side of online media and marketing for 6 years, I continue to find conferences like MIXX useful to keep up with best practices and encourage us as marketers to continue to push the envelope.
The MIXX conference ended with the MIXX Awards, which were fantastic. If you haven’t seen the winners, you should. You can check out the award winners’ gallery here. The MIXX awards personified a concept I have been talking about a lot during the last few years – that digital advertising is a deep discipline. In fact, to prove this point, the MIXX awards showcased 4 finalist campaigns in 18 different digital advertising categories, from branding Web sites to super rich media to in-game advertising. I have to believe that online media and marketing will only continue to expand… and the MIXX awards might need to add another hour to their program in the coming years!