Events & Conferences

On Wednesday this week, iCrossing hosted a brief talk on Social Media and the Law. The main speaker was Tom Cowling from media law specialists Swan Turton, but he was ably backed up by our own Antony Mayfield, and – probably somewhat less ably – by myself.

Photo credit: CC Flickr user no3rdw

Thanks to Tom for condensing so much information into his short speaking slot, and for sticking around to answer questions afterwards. Thanks also to Wired Sussex, and to everyone who turned up – we hope you all found it useful.

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Staying Competitive in 2010 is the next in the series of iCrossing hosted events attracting many clients wanting to hear from our search specialists on how to stay ahead of the game in 2010.   Doug Platts, Head of Natural Search and Tom Jones, Head of Media gave a snapshot of this year followed by a compelling look at 2010, highlighting these 3 key areas to ensure 2010 is successful for your brand:

• Integrate your marketing including aligning your goals, sharing data, paid and natural search synergy, consistent messaging and measurement
• Flexibility to change and adapt when necessary including real time marketing, contingency planning and response time
• Try one new thing including measurement, engagement, tools, brand recognition, and creating advocates

Here’s the presentation with accompanying notes for your own use.

And so, the mayhem begins. And the ‘keep fit, be happy’ motif that the IAB doggedly maintains throughout IAB Engage 2009 has already been compromised by the offer of free bacon sarnies and chocolates by Yahoo in the foyer. Nonetheless, the UK online ad industry’s biggest event of the year is here again and we’re all abuzz with excitement and the usual confusion about how exactly they discovered the venue.

Still, let’s get going…

…Sir Guy Phillipson is wearing a tracksuit! And a bad one. So attired he runs us through what’s been happening on the webnet this year. Cleverly he uses a slide put together by OMD/the IPA’s Matt Simpson to say that online display advertising is ripe for growth. What the slide actually tells us is what my former colleagues at Circus Street and I have been banging on about for ages – virtually ALL internet ads are direct response (search, CPA banners, affiliates), despite the web’s best efforts (especially the IAB) to tease brand cash from advertisers.

Still, Sir Guy has set the tone for the day – brand ads SHOULD now come to the web it is constantly argued – and, by the end of it, even I am half-convinced.

And thus the first speaker emerges into the lights and it’s… Heston Blumenthal! So striking is the similarity between web guru Charlie Leadbeater and the obsessive scientific super-chef, it’s hard to imagine it’s anyone else. So what the hell does Heston Blumenthal know about the web we wonder? Well, it turns out, quite a bit. His greatest nugget in a polished and relaxed performance (aside from listening to the sound of the sea while you’re eating a prawn cocktail) is that, to understand how to approach the next ten years, the key is to think about not doing things ‘for’ people, and definitely not ‘to’ them, but doing it ‘with’ them. Everyone looks suitably poignant and claps the Michelin-starred web commentator off stage.

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The Legatum Institute held The Next Generation Philanthropy Forum in London yesterday (at an intriguiging venue, The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury). It was an event that exuded the ambition that the title would suggest, full of ideas about how to galvanise philanthropy with market disciplines, measurement and the web.

I was involved in the last session of the day “Advocacy and Philanthropy through New Media” and had the job of doing some scene setting around the social web.

The slides from the presentation are below, but you can also see the session recorded as a very good quality webcast on the Legatum Institute website. My bit is followed by fascinating talks from Invisible Children, Ushahidi and Global Giving.

All are interesting, but for open source and general geeky interest, the Ushahidi presentation from Juliana Rotich (49 minutes into the video) is a must watch. Ushahidi is an open source platform for aggregating text messages, Tweets, emails and blog posts and making sense of them during a crisis, such as a war or natural disaster. It’s also been used for election monitoring and I expect others will find more innovative uses of it soon.
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In such a short space, it’s tough to summarise three days’ of keynote sessions at Internet World this year. Each had something inside it worth a comment of its own.

Nonetheless, the thing that struck me most – apart from the level of comfort with online marketing that advertisers are approaching – is that agencies continue to have a crucial role.

Agencies disintermediated?

Given this post sits on an agency’s own blog, you might accuse the writer of playing to the paymasters but, actually, I’m playing to the crowd, assuming there are some client advertisers in it (let’s hope they have good seats).

And my prevailing view has of late been towards the sense that agencies are losing their place in the world. When digital is so accessible and so fully plugged into advertisers’ (at least direct advertisers’) businesses – and with the commoditisation of ad space – it has become harder to make such a clear case for a [very expensive] middle man.

But, while the level of client marketer speaking at the keynote sessions at the event was extremely high and their insights valuable to the last man, it was the agencies that – for me – delivered the most in terms of how to see digital, how to think about it, and how – even – to dream about it.

Inspiration

Agency folk were given the graveyard spots in the schedule – most spoke in the last or penultimate session of the day. And – save where they had Google, mobile or social media in the session title – they were the least well attended.

But, they were all worth waiting for and, for those less interested in the practicalities of running websites and online campaigns, by far the most inspirational. For strategic insight, these it seemed to me were still the people you’d need to see.

For example, Norm Johnston of MindShare explained what to do with content: build it for everything and put it in the cloud. I-Level boss Andrew Walmsley showed us the levels of sophisticated modelling you’d have to approach to do justice to the value of online ad channels, including, (OMG!), banners. Andy Hobsbawm, co-founder of Agency.com, put technology in its place (‘technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories’) and, incidentally, was the only one to get the attention of Graham the AV guy – but then he’s doing the Pink concerts this week. And, last, Will McInnes talked about stuff I care about – not what social media can do to get you to the top of Google, but what it could do to help the people at the bottom of the pyramid.

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We had a great day at the Travolution Summit in London yesterday. iCrossing was sponsoring the media centre and the front three rows of the room were packed with bloggers and online journalists from the Times, Sunday Times, Travel Weekly and Travolution jostling for space – both literal (what does a blogger have to do to find a spare plug socket for his laptop?) and virtual (how quickly can I post my insights on the Twitter feed?)

You can see some of the debate that took place on the feed now: hashtag/ travsummit

Here’s my far from exhaustive run down of interesting insights:

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Just a quick one to let you know if you want to catch Jason Ryan (VP, Strategic Partner and Head of User Experience)  speaking  on measuring search and social media campaigns on the you can do so at the WARC’s Measuring Advertising Performance on Thursday the 5th of February at The Royal Garden Hotel, London W8,UK.

You can also catch David Hughes (Head of Performance Insigtht and Jonny Stewart (Head of Natural Search) at this year’s SES in London 17-20th February.

If you would like to arrange a chat with any of these guys at the event please email me and i’ll try my best to sort it. If you’re not able to catch them at the events we’ll be poping the presentations up on slide share anyway.

IAB chief executive Guy Phillipson is wearing his favoured combination of grey suit and coloured accessories so we must be ready for IAB Engage 2008! With a great big collective intake of breath we’re off, though we’re all still slightly confused about the dancers in scrubs in the foyer…

…Guy says Barack Obama won the election by harnessing the power of the web to connect, inspire and enable the people. Who’s in control? Brands like him who understand not just that a shift has taken place, but how to use it…

… Matt Mason author of The Pirate’s Dilemma and consultant to put-out Hollywood media moguls on what to do about the internet, explains how mainstream radio worked out a way to co-exist with pirate radio stations. They used it as a source for new music, new DJs and new ideas. Put-out Hollywood media moguls should do the same…

… the thing about economics, you see, is it’s predicated on scarcity. Digital is all about abundance and that means everything has changed, including the nature of storytelling. In fact, we should no longer seek to tell stories, but curate them…

…unfortunately, Jerry Yang’s story is a very dull one. He wants to talk about how we’re all in ‘the attention game’ but doesn’t really and also forgets to tell us his ideas on how to play it. Given he thinks Yahoo is strong because it is still a great ‘starting point’ on the web (which we’ll always need), we’re not sure he has any. But we are pretty certain that $33 per share was a very good offer…

…Mark Charkin, global VP of sales for Bebo, has got the attention game all worked out. What you need to do is sponsor a promotion through Bebo that generates lots of videos of young presenters running around and shouting, preferably to a guitar-led pop soundtrack…

…Matt Locke, commissioning editor for Channel 4 education, genuinely does have the attention game worked out. He’s hired an agency (okay, it’s iCrossing) to really measure how his audiences engage with his online content. As a result he tells his people to devote only a third of their budget to any launch. The rest should be used to react and adapt to what users think, say and do – because now you can know. It is the single most useful piece of insight to emerge from the whole day (really)…

COFFEE!

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Thanks to the IAB gang for putting on a top conference yesterday. If you missed it you can watch the presentations at www.iabengage2008.co.uk. I recommend everyone checks out the Orange presentation given by Justin Billingsley, Brand Director at Orange, in his socks! A truly inspirational session (thanks).  

Also worth a watch is our head of content and media, Antony Mayfield, presenting with Matt Locke from Channel 4 on our measuring engagement work for Channel 4 Education’s online game Bow Street Runner.

Brand Republic talked to a few industry experts about how they see social media and marketing working together…watch it here.  

iCrossing were pleased to support the conference as sponsors and look forward to next year!

We’ve been invited to share our Channel 4 story with hundred’s of brand advetisers attending this year’s IAB Engage 2008 conference on 12th November in London.

Matt Locke, Commissioning  Editor at Channel 4 Education will take the stage with Antony Mayfield and Jason Ryan to talk about how we helped Channel 4 measure online audience engagement with recent projects. These inlcude their new online game Bow Street Runner and Disarming Britain, a series produced to raise public awareness of the increasing gun and knife crime in the UK.

We join a great line up of speakers from Yahoo, Orange, Bebo and Sky. Going on previous years (check out Antony and others speaking at last years IAB Engage), the IAB guys and girls do a top job at producing an conference that leaves you with lots to think about and a sneak preview in to the future. It’s free for advertisers so book now and we’ll see you there…