I’m here at the Camelback Inn in Arizona for the first full day of the iMedia Agency Summit. So far, we have learned a lot about the trends in digital media and what’s happening for 2010. Here are a few bullet points I have written down that I’m excited to share with our clients when I return to Austin.  I am pretty proud of the fact that for all the agencies located in Austin, I am one of four agency representatives from Austin invited to this event. Pretty impressive for our boutique agency.

• “Technology is a solution looking for a problem to solve.”  I believe that technology is a great tool in the digital space, but we can get mired down in the analytics and measurement and forget the art and creativity of advertising when we focus solely on using technology.
• Interesting fact about the 18-25 year old demographic: They are channel agnostic and they text 6x more than they call. Wow, so different than me. Sad face.
• The demographics are shifting. By 2050 white people will be the minority in the U.S. In the top 10 DMAs 58% are already multi-cultural. A full 1/3 of your audience is multi-cultural and 2/3 of your customers are right now. That represents over $2 billion in spending power. Catch up advertisers!
• Behavioral targeting is not worth the effort. You might as well call the five people you are going to reach. So true!
• Local is the future of online. Now I’m biased on local, because it is definitely what we at Broad Street specialize in. There’s a reason people still place advertising in local newspapers. Local influence leaders, home gatekeepers, voters, and business owners care about and trust their local news source. If you are going to target, why aren’t you locally geo-targeting?

Let’s talk more about local. We can target your audience in the local market online and are introducing mobile marketing in the local space as well. Local online is increasing by 50% over the next 5 years, most purchases are made locally, reaching local audiences with local context is 4x more efficient.

If you are using local online media for news, weather, sports and information why do you think your audience is not? Those advertisers spending money on large network buys should focus their efforts on the local audience premium placements above the fold and not five pages deep that you can get for rock bottom CPMs sold as remnant inventory.

We work with traditional agencies in building out digital plans that mirror their offline buys and we work directly with clients to provide good ROI through using strategic online local ad buys for their message. We consistently see greater engagement with our local buys than when we place national buys on large national sites.