Unfortunately, after what I thought was a very good keynote yesterday for somebody in the marketing field, this morning session entitled Agency 2.0 is very disappointing.  The presenter is doing nothing other than just reading the slides he's created, not engaging at all, and it just boring overall.  Too bad, I was really looking forward to this session, and its just horrible.  I guess I've gotten used to the standard of many Microsoft presenters and they are quite skilled at what they do.

A few things gleaned from yesterday's keynote and thoughts afterward:

• We have to look for opportunities to go towards a more interactive medium for advertising
• We have to find a way to build a brand for our clients on the web, moreso than just a static website with a consultation form.
• While traditional mass media is not dead, it is morphing and changing with the times.  Rather than TV driving people to the web, the web is now pushing people to TV and to other forms of traditional media.

The reality is that going forward, we're going to have to look to non-traditional forms of media.  One of the issues that does complicate matters for cj is the target demographic of our clients' customers.  They tend to be either lower income, or older which are two demographics that interactive media really won't have that large an impact on.  The question becomes, do we focus resources on the larger demographic that tend to not be direct response customers, or do we just focus on the people more typically suited for a direct response approach (via Yellow Pages, TV, outdoor advertising, etc.).

My thought is that if we don't invest some resources into this "future" media, we'll be left behind, wondering what happened.  We need to lead the curve, rather than follow it.

Sitting in the intermission between sessions of Building a .NET app using Silverlight.  I know there will be plenty of people calling this the Microsoft Flash, and I can see that viewpoint (I guess), but the truth of the matter is that it appears, at least on the surface to be much more.  I really can't wait to start getting in and playing with these bits to build some media type apps.  I think Silverlight will be exactly what we need at cj, considering we are a MEDIA company.

Sitting in the intermission between sessions of Building a .NET app using Silverlight.  I know there will be plenty of people calling this the Microsoft Flash, and I can see that viewpoint (I guess), but the truth of the matter is that it appears, at least on the surface to be much more.  I really can't wait to start getting in and playing with these bits to build some media type apps.  I think Silverlight will be exactly what we need at cj, considering we are a MEDIA company.