Recently Peter Svarre and I spent two days in New York at the FOOA conference listening to an impressive set of speakers ranging from Roy Belanger, VP at Yahoo!, Carla Hendra, CEO Ogilvy North America to Jed Nahum, DPM at Microsoft.

Really interesting guys (and girls) who spoke passionately about metrics, long-tailed torsos, CRTs, CPCs and CPAs… Being just a dumb creative I spent a lot of time looking puzzled at Peter (thank god, he looked puzzled too). Luckily we heard a lot of other interesting and very creative people. Here are a few that I found really innovative:

Darren Rowse, pro blogger and founder of problogger.net.
ProBlogger is one of the leading places on the web for information about making money from blogs . Darren shared a lot of simple but really effective blogging advice like:
· collaborate with other bloggers in your start-up fase
· be contactable and get your “about page” in order
· know your metrics (here we go)
· be selective about the ads you place on your blog

www.problogger.net

Jay Adelson, CEO and founder of digg.com
Digg is one of the fastest growing Web 2.0 companies in the world with close to a million users. Basically digg-users rate different news articles on different topics in order for you to read the most interesting stuff first.

www.digg.com

Jim Coudal, Founder of The Deck
The Deck is a highly targeted and successful ad network encompassing 15 sites and millions of page views. What’s cool about The Deck is that they only accept advertisement from products and services that Deck members have used before (and therefore approved), and that they only allow a single ad on any page view.

www.coudal.com/deck

James Heise, Founder of VideoClix
VideoClix is the premier and only commercially available technology for creating clickable videos. It allows your viewers to click on objects in your video and purchase products, cast votes or get more information about the clicked items all without having to stop the video. Super cool!

www.videoclix.com

Brent Hill, VP at Feedburner
If you got something to say, make it available to all of us on RSS. That was basically Brent’s mantra, but he also talked about why you should advertise in feeds – because you get:
· quality of content
· great reach
· multiple targeting options
· great effectiveness

www.feedburner.com

Ted Murphy, founder of PayPerPost
In short PayPerPost pays you for blogging. Write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion and valuable feedback to advertisers. Interesting as it is to millions of bloggers, this what not very well received by the main audience, as a lot of people believe it takes away the innocence and honesty of blogging

www.payperpost.com

Greg Stuart, author of ”What sticks”
Finally an analyst worth listening to Greg has done some great research on advertising spendings and his result was shocking – of an overall $200 billion spend on advertising half is wasted, meaning it doesn’t reach or is not understood by the target audience. So what to do:
· Always have a backup plan - what are you gonna do if the campaign goes wrong
· Always agree upon the goals of the campaign (internally/externally)
· Make sure your motivations stick - online campaigns must always pass the glance-test!

www.gregstuart.com

Here are three keynotes I would like to pass on:

· Creative Testing online is cheap – so do it!
· Rating systems like the ones on digg, youtube and myspace are definitely some of the most important and interesting content defining Web 2.0 right now.
· We need to constantly keep track of “revolutionary” sites and ideas and pass them on internally in order to keep Hello ahead of the competition.

Hot summer greetings,

Anton
HelloCopywriter