At Austin Meeting, Seeking Exposure for New Tech Products a.k.a Advertising is dead : Scroll to the end for details
At Austin Meeting, Seeking Exposure for New Tech Products – NYTimes.com
At Austin Meeting, Seeking Exposure for New Tech Products
Erin Trieb for The New York Times
John Otjen, left, and Jennifer Van Grove, gesturing, using new online services at the South by Southwest Interactive conference.AUSTIN, Tex. — Benjamin Satterfield, a 33-year-old Internet entrepreneur, knows how fickle the Web’s tastemakers can be.
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Times Topics: South by Southwest Music and Media ConferenceLast year he unveiled an online collaboration tool called Twiddla at the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference here, which attracts thousands of influential Webheads. Twiddla won praise and even a prize at the conference’s Interactive Web Awards. But the spotlight quickly faded.
“We had millions of hits to the site,” Mr. Satterfield said. “Then it died off. I was in a trough of despair.”
This year, he tried to build something that would be used long after the conference buzz died down. He created Gigotron, a free Web and iPhone application that rounds up listings of nearby concerts.
The service is already running in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, and Mr. Satterfield is about to take the wraps off a version tailored for the Austin music scene. “You know you’re going to get traction at South by Southwest,” he said.
Mr. Satterfield is one of many entrepreneurs who flock to the conference in the hope of capturing the attention of attendees and elevating their product or service out of obscurity.
Twitter, the chatty Web service that is quickly entering the mainstream, first hit it big during the 2007 conference because of giant screens installed around the convention center displaying Twitter messages from the crowd. Shawn O’Keefe, who has been helping organize the tech-oriented portion of South by Southwest for nearly a decade, said that in the early days the conference also helped give a lift to the makers of the blogging tools Blogger and Movable Type.
But wooing the technorati is a tricky business. Start-up companies are aware that in-your-face marketing is a good way to scare off the kinds of people who go to South by Southwest.
JagTag, a company based in Princeton, N.J., that incorporates barcodes into marketing campaigns for the benefit of camera-phone users, decided not to attend the conference. Instead, the company sent a single employee loaded with several thousand promotional postcards bearing barcodes. “We didn’t want to do a hard sell,” said Dudley Fitzpatrick, the chief executive. “We just wanted to show it to them.”
“I’ve just been dropping them off at tables where people were taking a break,” said Scott Falconer, the JagTag employee assigned to promote the company. Attendees who snapped a photo of the barcode and sent it to JagTag were rewarded with listings of parties and events around Austin.
To some, though, handing out pieces of paper seemed a little primitive and, well, uncool. Rohan Walder and Mark Sando, who traveled from London to represent Rawrip, the music discovery site they work for, were not impressed by the fliers in the free swag bag that attendees received.
“When we first got our gift bags, we went through and threw away every bit of paper,” Mr. Sando said. “You would think that at a digital conference, they’d think of more intelligent ways” to promote a company.
The team behind PeopleBrowsr, an online dashboard that tracks updates across social networking Web sites like Flickr and Twitter, elected not to overtly market their Web application at all. “If we had a booth, I would be slashing my wrists,” said Jodee Rich, the chief executive.
Instead, they decided to release a special version of their service for South by Southwest attendees that lets users track events here. They got a few write-ups from tech blogs before the conference, and they plan to spend their time in Austin gathering feedback on the tool.
“We’re not pushing to the community anymore. We’re no longer hiring girls to pass out cards,” Mr. Rich said. “The community either loves it or they don’t.”
Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester Research who specializes in social media, put it succinctly: “Heavy marketing doesn’t work with the cool kids.” Those “cool kids” are the prominent bloggers or influential Twitterers whose endorsement could be valuable.
For Mr. Satterfield, even the best-laid plans were not a sure thing. Throughout the conference, cellphone coverage suffered as the influx of smartphone users overwhelmed networks. That could cut into the number of people trying out the new version of Gigotron during the music portion of the conference.
“I’m definitely worried,” Mr. Satterfield said, as the cellular network overload is “only going to get worse.” But he made arrangements to set up his own Wi-Fi router. That way, he said, “at least we’ll have a decent shot at getting some people to try it out.”
ED Note :
I am my own worst enemy when it comes to pushing my ideas through; I used to work in the creative dept. of one of the worlds´ largest advertising companies until I quit in 1998.
For me the writing was on the wall, advertising as we knew or know it was dead. The internet had taken over and life would never be the same :
i foresaw :
- advertising being replaced by referral and references ( a.k.a the simple hyperlink )
- the death of gurus and pundits; it doesnt matter where you find the link to a news item, promo code, product / service demo, video
- the internet is FLAT, this is why pt. 2 is true, neither Robert Scoble nor the NYTIMES has an exclusive anymore
- those who have the exclusives are the people MAKING the news
- put a CMS in the hands of newsmakers and a newspaper goes out of business
- if you put pt. 5 and pt. 1 together here is what you have – there are no ” major news sites ” anymore, so there is no place to go to where you can be advertised to
- so where do all the Ads go ?
- nowhere, advertiting is dead, Bambi.
- Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook ( for a bit ), MySpace and all the other Social Platforms ( Orkut, etc. ) together with the humble Blog have emasculated Creative Departments, de-fanged Account Managers, frocked Account Directors and put a lot of pot-smoking, dart chucking Lee Clow – wannabes on the pavement, iBook in hand.
- a few smart ones learnt HTML, then JSP / ASP, PHP / etc. swapped 3 cocktail lunches for tags, bought into geek speak via tag clouds filled with words like ” falt files, sql, web server, header and META tags ” and gave birth to Digg-nation – a generation of androgynous, drug and alcohol shunning, perenially excited, preppy-fashion loving vegans who think that being able to edit a CSS file is what makes a ” Rockstar ” web designer, ( why not ? They ” outsource ” all the heavy lifting to China, Vietnam, India. ) while snapping themselves with Paris Hilton.
- This IS the world we live in, only cows watch TV.
- It is a world of exploration, discovery, chatter and threaded convos. where 140 character “sentences” pass for a blog post.
- In a world where attention is in deficit and desideratum in plethora you dont go where the brands tell you to, you go where your friends are.
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At Austin Meeting, Seeking Exposure for New Tech Products a.k.a Advertising is dead : Scroll to the end for details
I’ve very intentionally kept myself in the dark about Google’s entry into the smartphone market — until today.