SmartBlog: Live from MIXX 2009: Blending art and science

This guest post is from Liz Perman, a senior manager with SmartBrief’s association relations team, and Adam Mazmanian, SmartBrief’s media and advertising editor, who are attending the IAB MIXX Conference and Expo in New York this week.

Adobe made big news last week, announcing its intent to purchase analytics firm Omniture. Ann Lewnes, senior vice president of corporate marketing at Adobe, took center stage at MIXX to discuss what she called “The New Advertising.” Lewnes said the Omniture acquisition will complete a loop between their core software offerings that are used to create digital advertising, and the need of marketers to track ad effectiveness. Within Adobe, Lewnes said, the coming acquisition was being described as, “the final union of art and science.”

Lewnes offered three ways of looking at the new advertising:

• “It’s all advertising.” Any content marketers should be imagined as an advertising opportunity. All online opportunities are chances for you to engage your customer, where it’s with a banner ad, widget or something else. She offered as one example, a Facebook game aimed at students that challenges users to tell real photos from doctored images.

• Marketing, now, is a “two-way street.” She cited the public beta of their Lightroom software, in which 500,000 users downloaded their product and 8,000 of those offered development feedback over 18 months. Lewnes said that the beta testers became huge evangelists for the software — proving, “the long term brand affinity you can get from engaging people in this way.”

• Think outside the rectangle. Imagine online advertising in forms other than banner ads. She brought up Adobe’s Jeremy Clark to demonstrate a new product that illustrated this principle — the New York Times Reader 2.0 that allows for the insertion of dynamically scalable ad banners that adapt to fit screen size, but appear as if they had been professionally composed. Check out reaction to Lewnes’ presentation and more from MIXX on Twitter here.

See the original SmartBlog note (Here)