Our Latest & Greatest:

Recently, PAN worked with the ad:tech team at their annual conference in San Francisco. In between working with attendees, running social media, and making sure all went smoothly, we were able to attend a few of the sessions, including one that addressed the future of wearable technology.

The session on wearables was lead by industry experts Brian Wong, CEO of Kiip, Kirk Drummond, Co-Founder and CEO of Drumroll, and Lauren deLisa Coleman, Founder of Lnk Agency. All agreed on the potential places wearables are heading to – and the one place it’s not.

Image by Keoni Cabral https://www.flickr.com/photos/keoni101/ used under CC license.

By 2019, the wearables market will be a $53 billion industry, according to Juniper Research – so it’s safe to say it’s not going away any time soon. The current state of wearables is that the consumers are very curious, but for the marketers it’s all about scale. More products are being churned out every day, but the actual adoption rate is very slow in comparison.

The last time I was at ad:tech it was 2006 and The Rubicon Project was a startup. Less than 10 years later, that company has IPO’d and this week’s exhibitor floor is bustling with hundreds of new companies disrupting how we monetize, market, publish and measure advertising in the complex world of today’s CMO and agency partner.

What I love to hear is how important the PR department still is to all of these efforts. On today’s keynote stage, both executives from Showtime and Bravo/Oxygen Media reinforced how important breaking down silos were to their organizations and how departments like PR and social media are “roving teams” to help connect and push out news elements tied to major campaigns.