This session was very interesting.  As a technology professional, the business side is not as transparent as it could be sometimes.  This session opened the door to understanding how advertising, both online and traditional media, work today and could work in the future.  Microsoft is investing in this vertical very heavily, and through some of these ideas is looking to become a major player. 

Market Overview – Now and In The Future

• The advertising market is manual – media is purchased through phone calls & emails
• The advertising market is opaque – there is no pricing transparency
• The advertising market is inefficient – there are loads of remnant inventory that drives prices lower
• Ad networks are the most efficient way to procure advertising
• They can buy them on CPM basis (cost per thousand) and sell at CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per acquisition)
• Ad Exchanges – they add transparency, increase liquidity by letting advertisers bid & buy across all networks
• Today – advertiser & agencies come up with marketing goals, the agency will change the mix of ad media manually to match
• In The Future – advertisers and agencies will define a media plan, translate them to business rules, and through automated experiments, an optimization system can evaluate and adjust the advertising mix in real time
• Each impression’s value can be set in real time, adjusted, and shift based on campaign objectives (awareness vs conversions, etc)
• In the future there will be very few analysts, and each of them will be dealing with millions of publishers through automated optimizers and exchanges
• Agencies and Advertisers (Buy Side) will have to be open
• Today – Premium sales force manages most ads, remnant sales force has less
• Future – Automated Systems will take away from premium and leave very low or valueless markets out

Optimizer Architecture

• seamlessly add advertising into any content, application, or device
• seamlessly leverage other Microsoft platforms
• Create ad funded businesses all in one platform

The  Brave New World of Advertising

• Nokia – leveraging the power of nanotechnology
• Hypertargeting, personalized advertising
• Personalized product offerings (like Nike – build your own shoes, custom Mini Coopers, Scions)
• Projectors, OLED, Disposable video
  • Low resolution projectors are really cheap now
  • OLED will become printable
  • Siemens Printable Video Displays – with printable batteries
• Tracking & Measuring advertising offline like online
  • RFID
  • GPS Phones
  • 2D Bar Codes
  • Bluetooth, etc.
  • Neural Scanning