Fred Wilson at Ad Age Digital Conference

Fred Wilson by Brian Oberkirch via Flickr

Blogging from the Ad Age Digital Conference

Keynote — Bridging the Gap: How Venture Capitalists and Marketers can Create Meaningful Relationships and Innovation
Fred Wilson, Partner, Union Square Ventures

See Fred’s blog: A VC

Focus is on earned media. “We’ve been investing in earned media for years. We just

never called it that.”

Shows chart on global ad spending. And lots of other pictures.

He’ll post the whole presentation to his blog. Paid media’s about media and creative. Earned media’s about conversations, and also analysis.(Note: thanks to Mark Silva on Twitter, here’s a blog post Fred already wrote about earned media).

Some stories:

• Mentions Kogi BBQ on Twitter – the Korean barbecue truck in Los Angeles that everyone’s following.
• Jonas Brothers: used Nabbr to deliver 28 million video views in 2 months and their first single, Mandy, reached #4 on MTV’s TRL.
• Men with Cramps: campaign for Thermacare (site’s no longer live)
• Monk-E-Mail – built by Oddcast for Careerbuilder – 30 million users interacting for 8 minutes
• Whopper Sacrifice – kill your friends for a Whopper. Killed 234,000 friendships before Facebook killed it. “This campaign established what the value of a friend was.”

Focus of VCs:

• Fund new kinds of agencies to work with and possibly buy, e.g.: Innovid, Oddcast, Clickable, Federated Media, Buddy Media, etc
• Fund new kinds of ad networks to buy media from: Tacoda, Meetup, TargetSpot, FeedBurner, Indeed, Simulmedia, Pinch Media
• Fund earned media platforms to run earned media campaigns on: Twitter, Disqus, Zemanta, Boxee, Outside.in, Tumblr, delicious
• Fund analytics, measurement, reporting: comScore, Chartbeat, Quantcast, Radian6, bit.ly

Future scenario proposed:

* Total spend of marketers goes up over next several years, where creative and technology spend goes up and media spend goes down

More coverage:

• Shafiq Shariff posts to Whrrl