A successful ad:tech Tokyo

A bit late in reporting, but ad:tech tokyo on Sept. 3rd ended with great success. As the first ad:tech conference held in Japan, there were more than 3,000 early registrations, and was THE event for the Japanese advertising and marketing industry, causing a massive slowdown in regular business during the two days of Sept. 2 – 3. It took tremendous effort to put together by the all-volunteer Japanese staff, including dealing in English for foreign visitors, to whom I would like to give much thanks again.

I participated in the panel “Adding Mobile to the Mix,” moderated by D2C’s president, Akihisa Fujita, who had the difficult task of managing a panel discussion for the less-than-one-hour session. My remarks were kept to a minimum as to allow enough time for my fellow panelists, Hiroto Ebata, Director of iMarketing of Coca-Cola Japan, and Olivier Legrand, General Manager of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, Asia. I found out later there was a tweet saying the Obama campaign was an unexpected topic for a mobile panel discussion, so I guess I was an unusual panelist. The PPT (in Japanese & English) should be up on the ad:tech website for those who are interested.

After the panel, my comment that “the point is to create products and ads that can be recommended to moms,” apparently made an impression to someone in the audience. This is a key point in order to engage with “consumers who don’t like to be marketed to.” The marketing industry tends to use gimmicks, but I believe that using the trust-based “Peer to Peer” communications as a basis, and the “kind of marketing that you can tell your own mother without embarrassment” are crucial to success.