MIXX Conference: the second ‘x’ is for xasperation

Does this town suffer from event overload? Sure, why not? How else to wake up in the morning and discover the Toronto edition of the MIXX Conference, run by the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada at the Carlu, and end the day with two or three hundred dollars worth of tweets? This one is explicitly about exchanging attention for money, though — no point in conflating that with journalism, or technology, or even do-gooding. But it probably helps to front-load the day with a bit of an ego: Steve Rubel, a senior vice-president at Edelman Public Relations, one of the first to figure out that if you did a blog about running a blog then you would never lack for things to blog about. That is, until reaching the Nietzsche-esque conclusion that blogging is dead, and where it’s really at these days is the lifestream. His official credo: “All media is social, all social activities are media.” And backs it up with bullet points! Rubel is such a believer in the flow that he thinks the next great media company won’t even bother building a website at all. So, keep your eyes on that sushi belt. Below, more gleaned via #mixxcanada.

The next speaker, Elizabeth Margles, the vice-president of marketing for Joe Fresh, don’t need no HTML — her point, in fact, was that placing high-turnover clothing stores in the same real estate as a supermarket transcends digital strategy. Their biggest investment to this end was buying the Joe.ca domain from the guy who was prime minister for a few weeks 30 years ago. Then again, Twitter and all that, I know! Turns out some folks would rather have the speakers stay on the message.

Then a sales research guy from CNN International, and you know it must be the International version, because his name is Didier Mormesse. What he has to brag about is CNN being consumed on all of television, desktop and mobile by 15 per cent of the audience, even showing off biometric data to measure the emotional, unconscious and moment-by-moment patterns of the audience. From this, they calculated 87 per cent of viewers are actually paying attention to pesky pre-roll commercials, and the eyeballs are paying attention to the advertising part of mobile content 6 per cent of the time. Heavy stuff — remember when CNN would be counted on to warn you about technologies like these?

More stats followed via Alan Li of ADTECH: one out of seven minutes of consumption now through a mobile device, 53 per cent of people click on mobile ads, 38 per cent have taken action as a result, 24 per cent have made purchases, 81 per cent use their smartphone while shopping and 74 per cent would redeem a coupon. He was also the second presenter of the day to praise the cyanide-free Tylenol® PM Sleep Tracker application for the iPhone. Just who is watching who around here now?

Last talker of the day, Lars Bastholm of Ogilvy, clicked with his analogy that digital media is becoming like a teenager, saying things like “Who am I?” and “I shouldn’t have done that” and “What can I do?” — and, presumably, still needing a lot of sleep. Spending 80 per cent of your advertising budget on television over digital is like spending 80 per cent of a movie budget on the trailer, he assessed. (Hey, it worked for VHS porn.) Digital is the glue that holds all the other platforms together, said Bastholm, which is what everyone there wanted to hear — because wouldn’t they be looking for another job otherwise? But all in attendance at MIXX surely know that the only way you’re going to get that hashtag love is by giving people something they didn’t previously realize they need.