Known among the Los Angeles tech crowd as a must-attend event for networking with fellow digital entrepreneurs and picking up deep learnings into the latest, greatest ad tech on the market, Digital Hollywood Los Angeles made its mark this year by finally attracting the majority interest of Hollywood producers, writers, filmmakers, directors, performers, and up-and-coming YouTube stars.
Gearing the majority of its on-stage content toward leveraging social media, monetizing entertainment content, and unlocking the power of programming, premium content, and advertising, a handful of Blast PR clients added a perfect high-tech complement to this entertainment-heavy session lineup. Some of the ad tech topics that Blast clients brought to the Digital Hollywood mix addressed hypertargeting (Jeff Hirsch of CPXi) video advertising cross-platform packages (Nikao Yang of AdColony), tracking the real-time social graph (Rob Macdonald of Dstillery), advertising analytics and contextual media (Eugene Becker of eXelate), mobile messaging and personalization (Greg Wester of Mobile Posse and Jonathan Zweig of AdColony), and social networks and video ads (Edwin Lee of MediaMath).
Some key takeaways included:
• Cross-device convergence is finally here as marketers manage campaigns across all devices.
• The world of hypertargeting from both the client and server sides will deliver a more sophisticated user experience.
• Traditional TV is moving to the internet, undoubtedly.
• Audiences are more responsive to entertainment than advertising.
• There is a much higher expectation among marketers for accurately finding cross-screen audiences.
• Marketing budgets are no longer siloed between traditional and digital ad spend.
• In the race between Apple OS and Android, the latter has been much more innovative.
• The ad tech behind ad insertion, ad serving, and on-demand is enabling greater creativity and enhanced options for technology and advertising.
• In the next two years, we will see exponential growth and innovation in programmatic media buying and programmatic creative.
• Driving re-engagement is a big issue for marketers as users tend to use a specific number of go-to apps but many remain dormant. So how do retailers and advertisers get users back into the app to make purchases?
• The home and lock screen is the dominant “app” of the future of mobile.
Panelists Jeff Hirsch, Willis Duran, Michael Rubin, Lewis Rothkopf, and moderator Jeff Hochberg prepare for their Digital Hollywood session on hypertargeting
