Highly High

I attended the SnapSummit conference yesterday with some enthusiasm and left with little more than a very flashy t-shirt. Much of the discussion was centered around advertising because it’s the principle form of monetizing facebook applications. Unfortunately, all that this elicited was a repetitive rehashing of the basic tenants of online advertising:

Find a balance between having engaging and intrusive ads.
Make ads relevant to the product/app.
Use metrics and ‘hyper-targeting’ strategies to focus on the right audience.
There is no one route to successful advertising.
etc.

One panelist said the following (paraphrased): “We did this deal with Anheuser-Busch that was all about “clinking.” So people would take pictures of their friends clinking beer bottles and it got popular. So instead of having a facebook app where you clink beer bottles, why not make them Corona bottles or Budweiser bottles?”
Audience member: “Doesn’t facebook prohibit third party brand names from their apps?”
Panelist: “Oh, ya I don’t know.”

This conversation was somewhat representative of the conference as a whole. I’ll say more about the conference in my next post.