That’s it, the 5th edition of LeWeb, the largest web 2.0 conference in the world, is now over; much has already been said by the likes of The Guardian,
about the nonexistent wifi at the event or about how the place was so
freezing cold they had a sauna installed at the back. What you probably
don’t know yet though is that on the basis LeWeb’08 was taking place at
the newly refurbished 39,000 sq meter artistic hub Le 104,
which used to be a Parisian mortuary, an historic place where you could
find more than 600 coffins and 150 hearses on the move, it’s not such a
surprise the place was so cold…

But LeWeb was so much more though than a cold place and it’s no
wonder that for the past five years more and more entrepreneurs, web
2.0 people and brands alike have registered to attend the conference…

Recession was pretty much on everyone’s mind during this 2008
edition of LeWeb, as was the search for investment from young
entrepreneurs wishing to launch their new big ideas. What’s interesting
is that all speakers actually seemed to agree on the fact that the
economic downturn will ignite many new ideas and that it is very likely
that those companies that will be the most known in 10 years or so will
most likely have been created during this recession.

Take Viewdle, for
example. A couple of hours before Viewdle were announced as the Gold
Winner of LeWeb’08 the start-up competition, Marissa Mayer, Google VP,
Search Products and User Experience was talking about video face
recognition and explaining how recognizing a human face as a person on
a video was still a few years away. Marissa mentioned that technically
it was possible but because of the sheer volume of videos now available
on the Internet, and how many people look alike, it was proving
difficult. Viewdle won the start-up competition with their facial
recognition digital platform which allows you to easily index and
search video assets. A pretty amazing technology and a proof that it is
still possible to come up with great ideas and technology.

Marissa Mayer also covered the notion of social search: when you go
to a conference for example, you ask like-minded people about where is
the best place to have diner, which hotel to stay at. Those are ’social
searches’, they happen all the time in real life but right now there
isn’t a simple way of doing this online and it seems that this is going
to be a focus for Google.

Social searches, using Twitter to talk about the conference, L’Oreal mentioning that brands are part of the conversation, Paolo Coehlo explaining how he uses his social media to interact with
his fans and how he even invites some of them to have diner with him;
it’s interesting to see how technology is enabling us all to refocus on
the most human thing: conversations. And I guess this is the strength
of LeWeb: it’s all about being able to meet a network of over 1,500
people from 30 countries, being able to share our vision of the
Internet, the Web 2.0 and the future alike with those people.

LeWeb’08 is over and I’m already looking forward to the 2009 edition!

ps: check out Loïc Le Meur’s blog post about the organizational issues encountered at LeWeb.

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Alain Thys and Stefan Kolle of Futurelab have published a thought provoking report on the advertising industry:

There is a growing disconnect between what advertising agencies offer, and what their clients are looking for

Although the report is focused on above the line and media agencies, rather than a specialist conversation agency such as ourselves, there’s more than the slide I’ve pulled out above to suggest that the approach we’re taking at We Are Social is what clients both want and need. Judge for yourself:

If that piqued your interest, you should also check out The Connected Agency report from Forrester:

marketers will move to the Connected Agency – one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations.

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I’ve been busy, what can I say. Meanwhile, somewhere in darkest Sussex:

Like boiling bilious lava, white-hot furious consumers vent wherever they find an outlet – spraying burning fluorescent looping lances of aggregated, unified rage

Read on…

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Iain Tait with a must read post, prompted by the must watch The Rise and Fall of the Ad Man, asking:

assuming that the time is right, what would you do to create a brand new agency, like they did in the 60s?

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David Armano:

forums, blogs, widgets and whatever alone are not where the action is at. Community clusters and connections are building blocks of our individual and group social systems. But what happens when these touch points become orchestrated? When they compliment each other and act as functional parts of a larger organism?

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It's worth reading this interview with Adam Curtis, the auteur behind The Century of the Self, The Power Of Nightmares and The Trap. He has a lot of thought provoking things to say…

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You have to watch this. Scared?

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As a direct reposnse medium, perhaps. A recent study shows that:

Heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. Heavy clickers are not representative of the general public.

This is backed up by…

…other research from last year:

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

So who are people clicking? Well, the most recent study says:

Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.

And the one from last year:

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

It seems pretty conclusive to me (although bare in mind that this is US data). Combine this with banner blindness, and things don't look pretty for online dispay advertising, which is probably why it's getting cheaper and cheaper.

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Andrew Walmsley:

In the past, companies had an inherent edge. With resources and funding superior to that available to campaigners, they could co-ordinate media coverage more effectively. One effect of web 2.0 is that this advantage may now have been lost.

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A wake up-call for the complacent PR industry:

Pollsters surveyed 1,000 people – Among those aged 15 to 44, it found that 45 per cent read online news on a daily basis. Only 38 per cent of this age group read nat­ional newspapers every day. The figures are the starkest warning yet to the industry that it can no longer afford to rely on traditional forms of media relations.

And it is not as if online PR wasn't important anyway…

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