Hamburg.
Marc Schwieger's talk at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is followed by a panel discussion with Marc, Martin Hoffmann from MME Moviement, and Martin Krapf from IP Germany. Krapf begins by noting that even the $70m in product placement advertising in James Bond movies remain a small component of all advertising; this is no revolution in advertising yet. While product placement will certainly grow, conventional advertising will continue to be the leading form. Indeed, product placement is most effective when combined with conventional advertising.

Hamburg.
The first speaker at the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI conference is Marc Schwieger from advertising agency Scholz & Friends. He, too, picks up the product placement theme: products, of course, are everywhere in everyday life, too, so telling stories from real life is difficult without showing the products that are part of it. Some 49% of Germans find product placement annoying; this is less than the 63% who dislike conventional ads. Placed products are also recalled effectively - but do comparatively little to encourage users to buy those products.

Hamburg.
For the last conference of my European odyssey, I've made my way to the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg, which plays host to a one-day conference of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation for Communications Research on the theme of "Finanzierung von Qualitätscontent", or "Financing Quality Content". I'm in Hamburg as a Fellow of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation, and will be speaking later today, on motivations for the creation of quality user-generated content.