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Association Of National Advertisers Conference '08: That Giddy Grim Feeling
Posted by: on October 17
Around 1,000 heavies in the ad biz — chief marketing officers, top sales execs at places like Google and Yahoo, magazine publishers, ad agency types — gathered in Orlando yesterday for this year’s Association of National Advertisers conference, and the lovely Florida weather contrasted rather sharply with the grim economic outlook taking shape.
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Hewlett Packard’s Chief Marketing Officer Michael Mendenhall, in a morning presentation, spoke at length about the emerging global digital conversation — a familiar topic he spiced up with some interesting current factoids. (To borrow one: 76 percent of Brazilians who are on the internet use a social network, and over half of these social network users check in with one every day.) In an effort to define the digital playing field — another familiar topic updated with an au courant example — he mentioned Ashley Qualls, an American teenager who’s built a formidable business from a website offering ways to spruce up MySpace pages.
Mendenhall said Qualls’ site gets 1.2 million unique visitors a month — a total, he said, that exceeds the combined traffic of the websites associated with teen magazines CosmoGirl and Teen Vogue.