The first session that I attended was all about 'what's next'? This was a question and answer event held by a panel of experts in their field. Speakers included Allan Rich, Jamie Matthews, Ivor Peters, Andrew Canter, Don Cowley, Steve Cox, Jayne Barr and Rob Lawrence. The speakers came from a variety of sectors from PR agencies through to advertising and media.
The session was focused on two main factors, the impact of the environment and the current recession. Most of the panel agreed that the credit crunch should be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat. Allan Rich explained how instead of having to cut back on expenditure, the budgets should be focused purely on your brands that have the potential or guarantee to have the best successful outcome. Instead of splitting the budget between 10 brands, focus the money on 1 or 2. This means more time and effort can be spent in those brands that already have the loyalty and awareness...the brands that people will keep going back to.
Jamie Matthews spoke about the constant change in power for methods of marketing communications, currently our society is moving towards digital marketing, but in a few years, the power may have shifted and digital will no longer be the mest method of communicating your message.
Jamie also stated how CONTACT and CONTENT in an advert needs to be spot on. It is crucial to place the message where it is going to be seen by your target audience, and it is also essential that the message given in the advert has an impact and is memorable.
In order for a brand to be successful, Ivor Peters stated that ther are 3 crucial factors that need to be considered. These are being able to measure the product or service, accountability of it, and there needs to be innovation.
In terms of advertising, it is still very much alive and the typical 30 second advert is still very successful; but it is all about whether it is actually being seen. In the 1970's, only 3 adverts were needed to be broadcasted to get the message out. Today however, 117 adverts are needed to have the same impact. Advertising therefore is starting to get very costly as with more and more people swapping to digital television (87% of people with TVs now have digital), it is easy to simply cut out the ads. This may be a reason why swapping to digital methods of communication currently have the most power in the industry. This issue is backed up by the fact that recently it was announced that Google is bigger than ITV in advertising revenues.
Steve Cox's input was that the fastest growing media is currently the use of posters. With more and more people out and about, posters are an ideal way to get messages out.
One of the last pieces of advice given was that " you are only as good as your last piece of work". If your last bit of work for a client was rubbish, they will not return to you.
One of the most common words used in this session was ENTHUSIASM ENTHUSIASM ENTHUSIASM! Without enthusiasm, you will not be successful in what you do.
The next session was hosted by Tom Vick form worldwide advertising agency JWT. Again the message that came across was that currently online and digital marketing are killing TV advertising, however, this will gradually change.
Another piece of advice given was that "word of mouth is the new marketing sensation".
Most of this session was focused on future predictions, some of them were:
- There will be a return to the full service agency. This will save on outsourcing and expenditure as every process to do with a campagin would be able to be completed by the one company.
- The disciplines of account and channel planning will merge.
- There will be an increase in global outsourcing and the "always on" agency. The idea of this is to pass work over to different time zones so that it is continually worked on 24 hours a day.
- There will no longer be a purely digital agency or advertising agency.
- There will be an emergence of mobile becoing a significant marketing channel. This can already be seen as mobile phones are adapting and are equippped with numerous applications, the Apple iPhone and the Blackberry can be examples of this.
- Finally, there will be a greater focus on cost efficiency.
The part of enterprise week was women in business day. This was a day presented by inspirational and high achieving business women talking about how to become a success and the stages that need to be worked through. There was a presentation on personal image, ways to improve your public speaking, a talk from Bucks entrepeneur of the year from an agency called Cirkle about how she created her now very successful business, and finally, a session on exploring personality types and ways of thinking.
The final event that I attended was the Xing challenge. I didn't really know what to expect when I first arrived to this session, but soon found out that it was a dragons den type scenario where each team was given a business idea and we had to come up with a vision, a target and a business plan for the next 3 years. It was an extremely interesting day, lots of fun, but most importantly I learnt a lot from the panel of experts that we had to present our proposition to.
