Paul Ollinger, VP Sales @ Facebook at Interactive Day San Diego

This week I attended Interactive Day San Diego, an online advertising/marketing ‘conference,’ at the beautiful Hilton San Diego Bayfront. I left half-depressed and half-excited. Below are some of my takeaways and thoughts on a variety of topics, all leading up to the importance of relevance and trust in the future of online advertising.

Newspapers, meet Groupon

[Insert decline of the newspaper industry history, followed by commentary on their lack of embracing the Web here]. With all that said, I was pleased to discover a bit of a glimmer of hope coming out of one newspaper, specifically the San Diego Union-Tribune (disclosure: I recently worked in their interactive ad division).

They recently jumped on the Groupon/LivingSocial/group buying bandwagon and, like the aforementioned companies, have experienced some rather immediate, impressive results. How impressive? Try $175,000 in revenue in 24 hours from just one deal posted. Needless to say, they’re going to continue to explore this revenue stream.

Their group buying experiment has been with a good crowd, too: 35-54, income over $75k, and upwardly mobile with kids. It makes sense for them to jump in: it goes with the “hyperlocal” theme, they can drive a lot of traffic to the deals and the costs are minimal in running it on the backend.

My one worry: what happens when brands don’t need the middle man for group buying? When a company builds a network of 30k-60k on Facebook alone, they’ll already have the audience. It won’t take much to code in the ability for group buying into existing sales systems, either (get on it already, Salesforce).

The point is that companies will soon have the audience and ability to do this themselves, and newspapers will be stuck again looking for a new idea to borrow to survive for a while. And, to be honest, that point has already been reached for a lot of brands, but on a local level it has a ways to go, so I hope more local newspapers capitalize on the opportunity while it lasts.

Why is mobile advertising still so hopeless?

I sat in on several sessions related to mobile advertising and the sad fact I realized is that nothing has changed from the sessions I watched three years ago when we were all sure mobile was on the brink of blowing people’s minds.

The fact of the matter is it has still gone nowhere; SMS marketing, QR codes, mobile banner ads, and the list goes on, have all made such little impact that many marketers are frustrated but still eager to jump in on the buzz that is mobile.

The “mobile gurus” continue to spew the same lines we’ve heard for years: everyone is using mobile (there are 4.6 billion cell phones in the world), people are rarely separated from their phones, and advertising to people based on their location is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Yet marketers get low results with text marketing, barely any results with mobile ads, and don’t even get me started with QR codes. Sure, some companies have seen results with texting campaigns, but most bought into the dream, saw it fail and never went back.

Foursquare has been the only real hope for marketers since it’s not obtrusive, it’s relevant and it’s part of a social experience. When you can provide something to a person without any opt-in registration and it enhances their social experience at a relevant time, you win (and businesses from local to national have seen it work).

As Paul Ollinger, Regional VP of Sales for Facebook, put it: “Mobile is an intimate device…you have to be invited, and putting a banner ad between users and the content they’re looking for is not the answer.”

And he’s right — you only whip out your phone when you want to find something specific; you don’t have time to go clicking around on ads that have no relevance to what you are trying to find. If, however, you’re trying to find where to eat or you’re checking in somewhere (because you are socially responsible to do so) and you’re presented with a relevant deal/ad/content, of course you’re going to check it out.

If there’s anything that mobile advertising is not, it’s over-the-top tech (QR codes), outdated tech (SMS), and certainly not adapted tech (banner ads). It’s relevancy and having it where people are visiting on their phones (Facebook, apps, search pages, etc.).

Authenticity & trust

Certainly the most important topic for me is the importance of authenticity and trust when trying to accomplish anything online, whether it be social media, social CRM, online advertising, etc.

Ollinger also focused on this in his keynote, and Facebook is certainly all over it with their recent social plugins that brands like Levi’s, Washington Post, Fandango, etc. have incorporated into their sites to create social relevancy to discovering great products, interesting articles or which movies are worth checking out.

We are far more likely to purchase something if it has our friends’ seal of approval embedded on the same page that has a “Buy it Now” button. Even sites like Yelp would be less powerful without Facebook integration as what good is it to read a set of reviews from people you don’t even know? It’s the same level of trust as shouting at a crowd on the street. The Web will no longer feel so unfamiliar the more that the social graph is integrated onto every brand’s sites.

Trust goes a long way, and TWiT has proven it

But I still believe that authenticity and trust don’t necessarily have to be entirely drawn from our friends. Take for example what I consider the most effective form of online advertising model: sponsored advertisements on trusted publishing sites.

Leo Laporte turned the TWiT network into a million dollar company by simply partnering with advertisers that he believed his viewers should hear about. Leo convinced me to get an Audible account, to back up with Carbonite, and maybe one day even buy a car with Ford Sync built into it. Why? Because I trust Leo. He’s very close with his massive audience and that “giving a crap” mentality has built a strong community that is willing to respond to any advertiser he talks about.

Every advertiser on the TWiT network is approved by Leo and is relevant to his very niche, techie audience. Relevance + trust = millions of dollars with ease. Trust goes a long way, and TWiT was smart enough to even put it in their branded tagline: “Netcasts you love, from people you trust.”

If people trusted today’s media (newspapers, TV, etc.), they could go back to pricing their ads at millions of dollars a piece. So although I applaud newspapers for utilizing group buying and giving their consumers relevant ads, most newspapers still lack any sense of trust with readers because of the content side. It’s why Leo and his “giving a crap” mentality has made his chat rooms filled with praise and passion, while newspapers’ comments sections are filled with complaints and anger.

Not many people are old enough to remember (myself included) the days when people trusted newspapers (“If it’s printed, it must be true!”) and ads were highly valued. In the online landscape, advertisers are desperate to find places to advertise where trust and relevance are provided with their buys.

Same goes for mobile: create platforms with ways to advertise that will be extremely relevant to a consumer and be integrated with my trusted social graph (i.e. everything Foursquare is trying to accomplish, slowly).

The bigger picture

The major takeaway from all of these points is that discussions on things like ad formats, PPC, SEO, QR codes, texting, etc. are all distractions from the bigger questions:

How can we as brands make our messages more relevant, and how can we present them in an authentic experience that ties into our consumers’ social experiences? And how can the middle men, the media companies, rebrand and refocus their efforts to also become relevant and trustworthy so that paying to advertise makes sense again?

If the bigger picture continues to be ignored, it’s going to make these conferences all the more redundant as the next five years unfolds.