I wandered through the caverns of Grand Central Station after walking the canyons of New York City. I’ve seen a constant stream of billboard and people. I have engaged with none, and as the train leaves the station, soon all that will be left will be a blur of them. Perhaps it provides a good framework for understanding the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference I have attended today.

The first session was about simplifying social media for agencies and publishers. Like food that is too highly refined, it felt like any nutritional value had been simplified out of the presentation. The woman speaking seemed to be selling her platform for hosted white label social media sites. People asked their questions about to how make sufficient revenues and how to quantify the results. The discussion came and left like the constant stream of people on the street.

The second speaker was Len Lauer, Executive Vice President of Qualcomm. He spoke about Qualcomm’s vision of the future; WiMax, GSM, Fourth Generation communications and the role of chips in all of this. He spoke about the convergence of computers, cellphones and consumer electronics. He described items available in Japan that should become available in the states in twelve to eighteen months.

He described the embedded chips that would handle a multitude of communications protocols, the goal of low powered chips and moving from TFT/LCD based screens that draw a lot of energy to new reflective screens using significantly less energy. He spoke of competing with Intel and various acquisitions Qualcomm has made.

This was followed by Francois Henry Bennahmias, President and CEO of Audemars Piguet North America speaking about their advertising strategy in a digital age. Audemars Piguet was a curious example. Their watches are all handmade. They only sell about 30,000 a year and the price per watch averages around $40,000. Clearly, they have a different advertising strategy than Kraft foods. It was an interesting presentation, but I don’t think I’ll buy one of their watches any time soon.

Henry Blodget, Co-Founder, CEO and Editor in Chief of the Silicon Alley Insider, then took the stage to lead a panel about digital content and advertising. There were discussions about the economic collapse and what it would mean to advertising. One person spoke of a flight to digital advertising. There was a discussion of the glut of CPM impressions and how the price of impressions must come down. This could be accomplished, one person suggested, by creating scarcity. Reduce the number of ad units on a page. Require that people buy ads for a full day.

Another way to protect against a decline in CPM prices is to focus on context in advertising. The rates for carefully targeted ads to specific audiences can remain high. I glanced over at Google News for the headlines; 'Body found' in Hudson boy hunt, 2 dead in Arkansas campus shooting; one suspect in custody, US raid into Syria a new tack in terror war,
Wall Street keeps dropping. What advertisements are relevant to these contexts? I thought about Postman and wondered about the bridge to the eighteenth century. How was the news, or the advertisements going to help us understand the human condition any better?

Alexandra Levy was the next speaker, addressing Google’s forays into bringing branded entertainment to the web. She spoke about the key principals that Google was focusing on, the user comes first, relevant advertising wins, and engaging the right audience is key. It all makes sense, but somehow, my mind drifted to Epic 2014. It is a different twist on the same old story. It all felt somewhat ominous to me and my thoughts drifted towards anti-utopias.

Users are tuning out, she warned. I checked Twitter. I checked my blog. I wrote some notes. It isn’t only users in the living room that are tuning out, it is attendees of conferences tuning out as well. Yet Ms. Levy described a compelling image, a relationship between the users, the advertisers and the content providers. The experience will be different every time. Users will receive entertaining content. Content providers will be able to tap the largest online distribution channel and advertisers will benefit from custom brand integration into the content.

An illustration that she spoke about involved Pepsi and Poptub. As she spoke about this, I read Steve Rubel’s posts about the Pepsi Cooler room just launched in FriendFeed. Pepsi is working hard to take advantage of emerging digital opportunities.

The following panel was moderated by Alan Chapell, president of Chapell and Associates. It focused on reaching the mobile consumer. One of the people on the panel was Dorrian Porter, CEO of Mozes. Early on they had Mozes up on the screen for people to interact with. Mozes is like a carefully controlled white labeled Twitter. Messages need to get approved and it seems pretty slow. At this point, I noted that there were five updates on the Mozes channel for the conference and thirty-seven on Twitter.

It seemed like Twitter was a real unsung star of the conference. Ripple6 was very well represented on Twitter with their team engaging participants in discussions here and there about the conference. Crisp Wireless also made a strong appearance on Twitter. This provided a stark contrast to one of the other advertising conferences I recently attended where keynote speakers proclaimed that Twitter was another flash in the pan fad that would soon be gone. Yes, users are tuning out, but as they tune out, they tune into new things, like Twitter, and for me, the Twitter backchannel was where the real conference and conversation took place.

Benjamin Mosse, the Mobile Director for The Associated Press was also on the panel. He explained that the AP was just entering this space, so they didn’t have a lot to report yet. He did note that the Obama iPhone application seemed to be the cutting edge of mobile, at least from his perspective, although others wondered how many different applications users will be willing to load on their iPhones.

David Berkowitz , Director of Emerging Media for 360i moderated the next panel. It asked how marketers can show off their social advertising skills? Before the panel started, Mr. Berkowitz was showing his skills by engaging in a conversation about the panel on Twitter, and conversation became an important theme of the panel.

Social advertising is about the conversation and conversational media. Unfortunately, companies are not set up for conversations. You need horsepower to keep a conversation going. You need to be willing to give up a certain amount of control to let a conversation flourish. If you aren’t willing to cede control, users will grab control and take it elsewhere. If you’ve got good content, then you want to give users enough control of the conversation and enough help to make your content go viral. One of the great things that social advertising has done is to force brand to produce better content. The word about inferior content will get out, one way or another.

This was the best panel of the conference. It would have been great to hear the panelists speak more about how to help advertisers become better conversationalists. Perhaps they can expand on this at the next conference.

As the afternoon rolled on, the content became less engaging. There was a discussion about the pros and cons about ‘pre-roll’ in videos. ‘Pre-rolls’ are the annoying ads that you see at the beginning of online videos sometimes. I couldn’t help but wonder how could pre-roll helped engage viewers in a conversation. It just seems to be more of the same old content that gets in the way of engagement. The discussion made the branded entertainment seem compelling.

Another panel talked about why metrics just aren’t adding up. There were brief discussions about whether the metrics are based on panels or statistics gathered from webpages. They talked about differences in filtering out robots and so on. The one promising discussion was about ‘engagement metric’. Don’t measure how many times a person sees an ad. Don’t measure how often they click through on the ad. These are all too primitive. How long does a person watch an embedded video? How long do they mouse over an ad? These are starts at getting a more meaningful engagement metric.

One panelist spoke about trying to understand the effect of an auto ad on a person who is too young to buy a car. Yet they remember that ad. They become engaged with the car’s brand. Years later, they finally buy the car and the statisticians don’t have anything to say about what really happened. Perhaps this is what Mr. Bennahmias was trying to do for Audemars Piguet, plant the seed for all the young admen to aspire to buy one of his watches when they become fantastically successful.

There was a brief reference to the ‘Media Rating Council’, an effort to standardize some of the metrics used to quantify web traffic. Quantcast noted that they were participating, even though the council’s audit seems to be stuck in the old analog paradigm.

I glanced at EntreCard and thought of all the aspiring bloggers hoping to make money online. They all focus on Alexa ratings, yet Alexa was not even at the conference. There was no reference to Alexa, and a quick scan of the web didn’t reveal any efforts of Alexa to participate with the Media Rating Council.

A few more panels and it was time for cocktails. I chatted briefly and headed home. Tomorrow, Jim Taylor of the Harrison Group will give the 4:15 keynote. I’ve spoke with Jim in the past about some of his work, and it has the potential to be an interesting keynote. However, I have a lot of other things on deck, so I’ll decide in the morning if I will head in.

The conductor announced over the intercom that the next station stop is Fairfield. I still have a ways to go before getting to New Haven. There are advertisements on the walls of the train and along side the station. There are people streaming off the train. Yet there is not a narrative, a story that is engaging or compelling.

I’ve not brought my copy of Neil Postman’s bridge to the eighteenth century. With the exception of one panel, I didn’t see anything that might be so much as a ramp to that bridge. Instead, I’ll read a little more of Blue Highways. It seems so much more engaging.