I just sat through Nick Brien, the CEO of Universal McCann’s keynote here at ad:tech. Much like the keynote I saw at AAAA by Jim Stengel, P&G’s chief marketer, Nick did a great job rallying the troops to embrace the new digital world and the upheaval in the media industry. He talked about experiences instead of just ads. Of course, we’re 100% in sync with this attitude. I was struck however, as I was during Stengel’s talk months ago by the lack of emphasis on software as a huge weapon in the marketer’s arsenal. I don’t expect to hear the conclusion that software is the most cost-effective weapon an advertiser has (as I already believe) but I would love to hear that people understand what kind of role software can play. In fact, not only did I not hear that but amid a video showing a funny (sexist?) cross-discipline Lynx deodorant (Axe in the US) campaign was Brien showing off that their web component got 657,000 page views.

Hopefully I’m reading my scrawled notes correctly in terms of the numbers, but I think I got it pretty close. Are 657k page views something to be psyched about? It’s true the campaign was in Australia with a smaller potential online audience than Globally or the US, however I wonder why they’re so excited. They even went as far as to point out that the number of page views was around a quarter of the population of 18-24 males they were targeting in their market. Hmmm… Some questions:

• why are they equating page views with unique users? (or did i get confused by their presentation)
• did they qualify the visitors to the site to know they were in their target audience?

And most importantly… why are they happy with so few page views?

A really compelling online and well-designed experience should be able to generate that many page views in a week, or even a day or two (or faster for the best of the best).

I went up to Brien after the talk and asked him why he didn’t mention software as such a cost-effective and powerful weapon and he agreed that it was an area of his talk that could stand further exploration and emphasis. Whether he was just being polite (he was quite affable and friendly) or really meant it I don’t know for sure. Given the passion and depth with which he understood and advocated every other component of the new advertising ecosystem my guess is that he was being genuine.

I wonder how long it will take for some of the most influential folks in the advertising community to really internalize the role software can play beyond the shallow games and distractions that are typically prevalent today. I intend to keep bugging them until the meme takes off and people start to get it.