A Quick Observation from the Conversational Marketing Summit

Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit was quite informative. I particularly enjoyed the rapid case study format which kept the conference moving and provided a wide variety of presentations from several different perspectives.

One quick observation based on the number of conversational marketing and social media programs presented: The demise of display advertising (yes, the banner ad) has been greatly exaggerated.

Nearly every conversational marketing case study presentation that I was able to observe had a significant display advertising component to provide program reach and recruit participation. How can this be? Haven’t we all been hearing from the industry pundits that display advertising is dead and that social media is where budgets need to migrate? It appears that display advertising (as well as TV, print, and other media) was a key ingredient to what the conference organizers were positioning as successful examples of conversational marketing.

That display advertising would be a key recruitment point for conversational marketing programs makes perfect sense to me. Many marketers, however, are being forced into making a false choice due to the poor reputation that display advertising now has and the industry-wide hyper-focus on social media. The choice entails cutting display and moving those budgets into social applications and conversational programs almost exclusively. This typically results in dismay at the scale of participation within nascent conversational marketing programs.

Alas, it’s not display OR social media…it is display AND social media. Actually, it’s more like multi-media AND social media, as many of the most impressive conversational marketing case studies presented at the Federated Media Summit featured an array of media outreach, including TV, leading to highly conversational experiences.
The take-away in all of this is that Scale and Efficiency do not necessarily have to be abandoned when pursuing conversational marketing initiatives. It is more a matter of coordinating high reach media, including display, with conversational opportunities to obtain branding and influence goals. The current digital media discussion of display vs. social is false. Properly structured, all media can be conversational.

Regards,

Michael Clark