Disney's Brad Davis
with
Don Schechter
Brad Davis, senior vice president at Disney Online, talks about the generational use of Facebook, the key to mobile web advertising, the promising future of broadband video and Disneys 360 Solution to advertising.
Transcript: Disney's Brad Davis
Our entire platform within the new Disney.com is widget based. Our DXD platform and we've had several advertisers from Hewett Packard to Sony to Walmart to Target, who all use widget-based advertising in finding solutions and reaching those kids and tweens on Disney.
I do have a Linked-In account that I use actively and what I find interesting about that, and I think this is the level of awareness that has increased on social networking within the business community. I ve had this Linked-In account for like three years. Just within the past 6 months, I have received more invitations in the last 6 months than I had the 2 years before that.
I don t think that Facebook will be the next Second Life, because it appears to me that it has been engrained into the fabric of a certain generation. Not so much from the technical aspect, and I know a lot has been written in the press about them opening up the software and allowing customized widgets to be created for Facebook. In my observation and in my personal experience, primarily through my kids, that s not what they use Facebook for. They use Facebook as a communication tool. It is a true social network for them, and as long as Facebook can retain relevance for that generation it may continue for a while. The interesting thing will be can Facebook make the real jump into the post-college age, 21-34 environment, just getting into the workplace and really beginning to enter the adult world. Or will it be like a baby center that just turns over users every X years.
The advertising community hasn t grasped the true potential of how you advertise in the mobile space. Mobile advertising is not going to be about banners, I don t even think its going to be about wap-sites for advertisers. Ultimately its about the one-to-one communication or the direct response vehicle that SMS allows an advertiser to engage in. I personally don t think mobile ads will come into play until that geocentric potential of mobile can be realized. When you can walk by the Banana Rep window and receive an update of the specials that are in that store if you have subscribed to that. I think there s a lot of potential there, and that we are at least 36 months away if not longer.
The greatest thing for me is that broadband video and that experience is now truly coming of age. Five years we were talking about video, but it took us five years to get there. That is great. I say that from the multiplatform and cross media environment that I sit in professionally. I work quite closely and represent television properties as part of my job. We don t look at it as a deterrent to television viewing, it is changing television viewing, but from the perspective of it you have good programming, create good content, all it has done is expand the consumers opportunity to get that content on their own behalf. I think that is the coolest thing right now.
And maybe it s just one of those things kind of when you buy a car and then after you have bought it you see all those cars on the road. You see people using their iPhone all the time. I believe it is a game changer because it for the first time I feel it unplugs us from our desk, our home computer, our laptop in being able to utilize the web for true daily needs and well as for information on the fly.
