AD:TECH - Marsteller Chairman Talks Marketing

[Garrett]

I got up bright and early today and headed to the Palace for the last day of AD:TECH. The audience has thinned out considerably.

I walked into the keynote hall and talked to one of the suits in the back, Andrew Nibley, Chairman of Marsteller, a major advertising firm from New York. He was text messaging away and I interrupted him to ask him about his take aways from AD:TECH.

He pointed to what he called an "aspirational theme" that's emerged - television ads moving to the net. He seemed to think it might not happen, but noted an interesting trend.

The ads that he thinks are on the edge of online marketing include the subservient chicken and the Seinfeld/superman ads.

He also mentioned edgy, often inappropriate ads that seem to be obviously created by large firms and then left to spread virally. Due to the sometimes explicitly sexual or violent nature of these ads firms and their clients often claim that someone else made them.

He was glad to see that the industry's getting stronger again. The venture capitalists are back, he said.

Search, he said, was another major theme at this session, especially from the vendor perspective. There were only two sessions that dealt with search, which I thought odd.

He also found the word of mouth interesting, and thinks there's some value there for marketing.