By Dan Cohen
I recently had a chance to attend the Israel AdTech Conference in Tel Aviv. I hadn’t originally planned on going, which was a mistake. Ahead of the event, I asked myself what can a PR, Crisis, and Social Media Consultant get out of a day with data-driven marketers? Turns out – quite a lot.
Before the conference, I got a last-minute invite to serve as Master of Ceremonies. If you know me, you know that’s basically catnip to me. A microphone and a captive audience is a combination I can’t resist. This lead me to a space filled with the top digital marketing folks in Israel, as well as folks who had traveled from the Bay Area, Ireland, and Spain.
Here are a few lessons I took from the day and how they might apply beyond AdTech, and be informative for all strategic communicators.
Engage Business Influencers: LinkedIn is an incredibly underutilized tool for finding business leaders… and they are making it easier every day. I saw a terrific presentation by the Yoel Israel at Wadi Digital. He is using LinkedIn to short-circuit the usually labor-intensive task of reaching C-level executives. You can see the full presentation here and here, but in a nutshell, LinkedIn is combining its incredible amount of data with a new set of tools that allow you to engage leaders directly on LinkedIn with forms, surveys, and even videos.
From a policy advocacy standpoint, we are continually seeking business leaders to take an interest in or take ownership of our issues. Perhaps some of these same tools of engagement and targeting could be put to use to turn today’s CEO into tomorrow’s passionate advocate. And, once engaged, we can turn those thought leaders into effective communicators on that very same platform.
The Attention Economy: Mike Degagne of Moat Digital put what we all know intuitively into stark numbers. Human attention spans are diminishing at an ever-increasing rate. He said that in 2000, it was 12 seconds of attention. Today, its 8 seconds. And this has a direct correlation to the 1.5 billion smartphones in use around the planet. You can see his full comments here.
For communicators, the trend lines are clear. Mobile phones are where individuals are getting information. Mobile video consumption is up 1200% in five years. 75% of global internet use is mobile. Ad spending is following those eyeballs, and communicators would be wise to take note too. His counsel, which we can all take to heart, is that our efforts should be digital first, mobile first, video first strategies. In thinking about our communications and PR efforts, we can now echo this approach. Are we asking our clients about their digital assets? Are we using engaging and compelling video to tell stories? Can those videos be consumed on mobile? If not, we know where to start if we want to earn our share of attention.
Artificial Intelligence: There were two interesting perspectives derived from the consumer experience perspective that could also apply to strategic communications.
The first was from Michal Lichtman of SundaySky, which focuses on personalized video. She said, “Either you manage machines… or they manage you. Right now, the machine will manage us… and then we’ll manage the machine. We use AI to render fully personalized content/videos.” You can read a blog describing more about real-time video driven by AI here.
Microsoft/Bing is also all in on AI, especially on using bots. They have created slick videos featuring how they help a blind man to see and another on how real-time AI using Bots can help a squad make plans in real time. For us as communicators, the opportunities are many-fold.
As Mary Geraghty of Microsoft reminded, we are in a DIY bot era. Anyone can download some easy tools and make their own bot. For advocates, this can mean turning your FAQ into a real-life answer machine. For universities, it could look like empowering a bot to answer all the nervous questions of incoming Freshmen or their parents. For elected officials, this technology may serve as a front-line answer service on regularly queried issues to save an overstretched office staff.
No day would be complete without a few “AHA” moments. Here are my other takeaways, in no particular order:
- Voice is the next big thing. Whether its on Alexa or any other platform, accessing information by voice is coming.
- Search Engine Optimization consultants all told me that PR is more important than ever. The inherent credibility of media coverage from legitimate outlets can move the SEO needles in ways that nothing else can.
- A recommendation by Gilad De Vries of Outbrain stood out to me as a must read for marketers: Zero Moment of Truth – a new Google E-book. He shared in this video that in the last 5 years, we’ve doubled the level of engagement before conversion— now it takes over 10 pieces of digital data before a consumer (or constituent?) makes a decision. How do you join this journey? Can you get in on the discussion when people are undecided?
A huge thanks to Avi Abelow for posting his videos from the conference. Hire him today. And a huge thanks to Eli Mandelbaum, Chairman of Israel AdTech for the invitation and the great David Yahid, entrepreneur for being a superconnector.