DPAA Conference Impressions

October 24, 2013 by Dave Haynes

I’m in NYC and on the go, with pretty much zippo time to write. But here goes …

This was the 3rd or 4th time I have been to the DPAA conference. Good venue. Well-run. Very well attended. Lotsa vendors spending a good chunk of change for a one-day conference break area booth – particularly RMG Networks.

To be fair I only got there midday because of the cars, planes, trains and subways thing to get from my house to NYC via Buffalo. But I walked in and within seconds there was somebody up on the stage saying Content is King!!!

Now at that point, I wanted to 180 out of there. But I stuck around.

This is a conference intended entirely to polish the apple that is the ad side of this industry, so you get lots of agency people talking in Agency Martian. Someone new to the business would struggle to understand all the blah-blah in the planning world’s particular language.

You also hear the same stuff over and over again, year after year:

– it’s interesting

– we get it and like it

– but it is hard to buy

– it needs more measurement

– it’s a nice to have on buys, but also one of the first things to get cut off a plan if budgets are trimmed.

The programmatic buying session at day’s end was the most interesting thing I heard, and when I have more times will put my notes together on that.

Impressions of industry friends:

– yeah, same old thing

– rolled eyes

– and from someone who unceasingly sees sunshine on cloudy days,he thought it was terrible and embarassing.

I dunno about that, but while this is a conference about digital OOH/digital place-based/location-based video, it is built around the people buying, NOT the people selling or enabling. If all these planners and brand clients get a little better grip on what this is all about and why they want to buy the medium, the network operators benefit, as does the broader eco-system.