B1BLOG

Last week, I got the chance to hang out at the Future Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit 2007 in Lon­don. The theme was integ­ra­tion and it man­aged to attract a host of prac­ti­tion­ers from a decent vari­ety of agen­cies – large, small, digital, tra­di­tional etc. While it was clear that most agen­cies haven’t fully cracked integ­ra­tion, there was a con­sensus view that we are all headed in that dir­ec­tion – always good to hear when you work with an integ­rated agency.

I won’t go into a blow by blow report of the sum­mit, you can find one of those here.

A couple of things struck me. One was about the rela­tion­ship of advert­ising to design. For two dis­cip­lines that are so close on one level, on most oth­ers they often appear to come from dif­fer­ent plan­ets. I’ll post more about this soon, I want to mar­shal some thoughts first.

The other came from a com­ment that Rus­sell Dav­ies made. The panel was dis­cuss­ing who was good at integ­ra­tion in action (as opposed to those who simply talk a good game). Crispin, Porter + Bogusky came up as the cur­rent poster child of the integ­rated agency world. Rus­sell made the point that there was no magic for­mula to their suc­cess, that they obvi­ously had a dens­ity of tal­ent but that their real skill was that they got on and actu­ally made the ideas real.

This thought was bril­liantly illus­trated later by Tim Ashton of Anti­dote (who I felt was the closest of any­one at the event to get­ting the whole integ­ra­tion thing right and was the one presenter to make me feel down­right jeal­ous). He presen­ted a case study around We are what we do and the Change the world for a fiver book. It was a great example of just get­ting on and doing it. I’m sure the charity-ish nature of the book helped in their abil­ity to beg and bor­row mater­ial but the atti­tude of just get­ting it done that Tim talked about was inspir­ing. If they needed a shot and couldn’t get it, they took it. Many agen­cies wouldn’t dream of doing this, they’d want it all pol­ished and per­fect. But the res­ult Anti­dote achieved was cer­tainly good enough.

This move against overly pol­ished work, towards work that’s always work in pro­gress is a massively lib­er­at­ing thought. Yes, it’s still got to look good and has to have a great idea behind it but not be so ‘con­struc­ted’ that it feels like spin. Jay Chiat is often quoted as say­ing “good enough isn’t good enough” but today, maybe it is. If the think­ing is right, if we make the right con­nec­tions with the audi­ence, if we’re authen­tic, then we can begin to loosen the grip of the cookie cut­ter brand manual.

I can only see this as a good thing.

Life­hacker points to a handy new site – with yet another ridiculo.us name – popuri.us. Essen­tially the site aggreg­ates a bunch of sources to give you a pic­ture of how pop­u­lar your site is. So you get its PageR­ank, Alexa rank, Tech­nor­ati links and a bunch more. See the BBC example below:

While this isn’t rocket sci­ence, it does bring it all together in one place. One for the bookmarks.

AppleIn­sider has an art­icle on the wider pos­sib­il­it­ies of mul­ti­t­ouch for Apple bey­ond the iPhone. While the pos­i­tion­ing of this as being a “mega-platform” feels a little like jar­gon­itis, the idea makes per­fect sense.

The art­icle is more focused on the effect this could have on Apple’s share price than on cus­tom­ers but the change in pos­sible user exper­i­ence is surely the big story here.

While OS X is already pretty much a doddle to use, all OS-es are now reas­on­ably sim­ilar. And most mice have just about as many but­tons and wheels as they can handle. Mul­ti­t­ouch offers the chance to have a far more intu­it­ive inter­face with way bet­ter use of screen real estate – run­ning out of room? Just pinch. It also offers a change in mind­set where the user is closer to the action, not hav­ing to act on the screen through other attached devices.

Whether this will do for PCs what the iPod did for MP3 play­ers remains to be seen but I’d be very sur­prised if we don’t see a mul­ti­t­ouch iMac before too long.

Regard­less of where you stand on the iPhone, it was hard to remain unim­pressed by the demo of the mul­ti­t­ouch screen. Watch­ing Steve Jobs pinch­ing pho­tos smal­ler and big­ger was a real oooo moment. (Although, put­ting it that way makes it sound a little underwhelming.)

Now, it looks like we might get this tech­no­logy on a large scale. Jeff Han, one of the brains behind mul­ti­t­ouch has cre­ated a new com­pany Per­cept­ive Pixel to develop large screen ver­sions of the tech­no­logy. You can see a pretty mes­mer­ising video here:

You can also see Jeff demon­strat­ing the tech­no­logy back in Feb­ru­ary 2006 at TED.

I badly want some of this. It makes our write-on walls at Ban­ner seem pretty lame by com­par­ison. Of course, I’d prob­ably just spend hours re-sorting my vir­tual desk and pinch­ing things to all dif­fer­ent sizes. Fun though.

Source: Present­a­tion Zen

So I spent yes­ter­day at this year’s Insti­tute of Dir­ect Mar­ket­ing Business-to-Business Con­fer­ence. I rarely get to con­fer­ences. Even the ones I book on always seem to fall on days where ‘stuff hap­pens’ and I become another no-show. But yes­ter­day, I actu­ally made it.

And wished I hadn’t.

The only reason I will go to events like these is to learn stuff. I’m not inter­ested in the net­work­ing (prob­ably because I’m rub­bish at it) and catered food only holds so much appeal. It’s all about new think­ing that chal­lenges the mind and expands my understanding.

Apart from the odd men­tion of blogs and a good over­view of search mar­ket­ing (presen­ted really well by Chris War­wick of Hoover’s) this could have been a con­fer­ence in 1997 rather than 2007. We were told of the need to under­stand busi­ness cus­tom­ers as people. How mar­ket­ing and sales really should get on bet­ter. And given an insight into how a cam­paign can pro­gress from “frankly we don’t know what we’re doing” to “for the most part, we do know what we’re doing.”

I then joined the “mar­ket­ing to cor­por­ates” stream that con­scien­tiously avoided any men­tion what­so­ever of how to mar­ket to cor­por­ates. Soon after, I lost the will to live.

Business-to-business has always been FMCG’s ugly sis­ter. But the chal­lenges and oppor­tun­it­ies within B2B/considered pur­chase are (IMHO) far more inter­est­ing than FMCG. The com­plex­ity of the sales. The need to really engage with the mar­ket over a long period. The chance to part­ner with cus­tom­ers. All offer massive scope for innov­at­ive think­ing and fresh approaches.

If what I saw yes­ter­day is rep­res­ent­at­ive of where most of the industry is at, we should all be very afraid.