Markus Roder, Head of Strategy with Dialog Solutions GmbH (DSG), gave a rousing presentation at the 8th International bitfilm-Festival. This year's focus was Video Advertising in Interactive Media, a perfect match for DSG’s core competency of 'Viral Marketing'. The audience got treated to a wide spectrum of theses about the topic, topped off by a variety of examples and best practices.

Creative types from the advertising, film, motion design and video art industries congregated at Schmidt's Tivoli on the legendary Reeperbahn to learn more about the hype and the truth of Viral Marketing. International speakers, among them Stephen Price, editor of the New York based DVD-Bible Stash Magazine contributed a fascinating speech, as did Scholz&Volkmer-CEO Boris Lakowski, leading the captive audience through a case Study of 'Mercedes Benz TV'.

DSG-Strategist and expert on consumer psychology Markus Roder describes the connecting theme that each speaker reiterated in their own way: 'Advertising as an interrupter of everyday life is a dying species.' A paradigm shift seems to be the inevitable consequence of this insight: 'In times when people are the supreme sovereigns of the timing and type of their media use, successful advertising must integrate and become a PART of everyday life, instead of interrupting it', says Roder.

During his presentation he shed some light on how to achieve such an integration – and how to make advertising infectious. Centred around provoking a response from the audience (without the usual shortcuts 'violence' or 'sex'), he talked about how to break viewing habits 'softly' – for example by using the psychological techniques of 'self-identification' and 'compression'. One of his examples was the 2007 Cannes Award winner 'DOVE Evolution'... and its interaction with the response 'Slob Evolution'. Showing how audiences interact with advertising, thereby making the 'Original' even more effective was a leitmotif of his show. Using creative dialogue with the previous presenters, Markus Roder demonstrated the validity of Scholz&Volkmer-CEO Boris Lakowskis thesis that 'advertising has to be designed to be welcome... and it has to offer feedback loops'.

Hamburg, 10. September 2007

›› The agenda as a download can be found here