What do people in the marketing and media industry enjoy about attending events? What do they dislike about such extravaganzas? And where else do they go to expand their industry knowledge? In these Dog ‘n’ Bone podcast specials recorded amid the hustle and bustle at Advertising Week Europe investigates these questions by quizzing a host of executives.
Guests include:
Steven Filler, General Manager Europe, Oovvuu; Anthony Lawson, Director of Sales, Activision Blizzard Media; David Shing, Digital Profit, Verizon Media; Jonathan Kitchen, Commercial Director, Jungle Creations; Amanda Farmer, Managing Director, VMLY&R; Ravleen Beeston, UK Head of Sales, Bing UK, Microsoft; Jon Mew, CEO, IAB; Edward Bray, Head of Programmatic Trading and Sales, Guardian; Gavin Stirrat, VP Europe, Partner Services, OpenX; Luke Benyon, Head of Marketing, Video Intelligence; Celine Saturnino, Chief Commercial Officer, Total Media; Amy Williams, Founder & CEO, Good Loop; Pete O’Mara Kane, General Manager, LoopMe; Chris Babayode, Managing Director EMEA, Mobile Marketing Association; Martin Loat, Founder, Propeller Group; John Hegarty, Founder, BBH & Whalar; Kate Cox, Former CMO, GoDaddy; Nick White, Online Director, Samsung UK; Keith Moor, CMO, Santander UK; Adam Harris, Director of Custom Solutions, Twitch; Harsh Kapadia, Executive Creative Director, VMLY&R
What do you like about industry events?
Click here to listen to who said what!
Diversity of content
Inspiration from sessions that aren’t core to what you do
Learning about new areas that are reinventing themselves and the implications of their strategies surrounding it
Catching up with media industry contacts and clients
Chance to have an intimate catch up with people I haven’t seen for quite some time
Able to get a lot of good, new, fun information out of them
The amount of inspiration you can pick up
The number of people that are talking and the diversity of content they’re talking about
Incredibly inspiring
Getting an understanding of what the hot topics are in the industry
Helps reframe what you’re thinking about your own business
Meeting and catching up with people that you haven’t seen in a long time
Learning
Opportunity to meet other like-minded people
Opportunity to network with customers and potential customers, trade bodies and partners in the press
Chance to get out the office and connect with colleagues and peers from other businesses
Opportunity to learn from people’s experiences and think about how we might do things differently in our business
When it becomes more interactive and you have an opportunity to meet other people and learn from each other
The opportunity to learn
Serves a reminder of all the great work that’s happening outside your own company and the work you do with your clients
The opportunity to learn new skills and research
Networking opportunities and the chance to actually meet people
Getting to meet lots of other interesting people who are in the same world as me trying to do great work
The serendipity of bumping into people you know
The amazing things you find out
Figuring out what other clients are up to
Getting out the office and seeing what’s going on is so beneficial
Meeting people with lots of different mindsets, experiences and skills
Building networks of interesting people, you might not think are the most influential because sometimes the best people you meet have a more tangential relationship
The opportunity to have a voice and let people know who we are, how it works and why people would even watch other people play video games
Meeting new people
What do you like about industry events?
Click here to listen to who said what!
Frustrated that some of the content can be too high level when you want to get into the weeds and get more micro
Maybe where the title of panel and what happens don’t align. Then you don’t learn too much but I guess they still have value to people who may not know what you do
The constant pontification and lack of follow through
There can be great sessions but sometimes you can feel that you’ve wasted your time
The fact the agenda is so brilliant that you can’t literally be in two places at once and having to pick and choose
Bumping into people I don’t really want to see
Being mis sold under the pretence of learning
Oversubscribed events mean you can’t actually get into the sessions you want or if they’re overrun with rigmarole
There is an irony particularly when you go to trade events around the world that you’ve spend quite a lot of time with people from where you’re from
When panel members or speakers haven’t prepared their content, or you feel like they weren’t giving 100 percent
Can be a bit overwhelming when it’s really big and there’s too much going on and you just feel like one person in a crowd of one million
When you get the same big players that just repeat the same almost political lines that I’ve heard before
I would love to hear people speaking more candidly and more openly, removing some of the political answers
The badges and labels are never big enough so that you know who you’re talking to when you’re networking
The fear of missing out and the risk that I may have missed a really interesting session
I wish more events would do a circular summary at the end of them to highlight the key points of the event
Too much focus on one industry narrows the mind rather than expands on it
Genuinely absolutely nothing I dislike about industry events except when I don’t have time to attend them
Getting jumped on by 25 people shoving me their business cards and asking me for one
Navigating myself around them, the UX of an event is always a nightmare
Probably doing podcasts like this
Seeing people that come to industry events that don’t want to be here
Where do you get your info from that helps you do your job?
Click here to listen to who said what!
Traditional trade press still plays a role but less so
I find that podcasts have become increasingly good for spending an hour or two digesting a wider breadth of content
The Drum and those kind of sources
Most salient emotion tends to come directly from client agencies and sometimes even competitors
Working with a bunch of very talented 20 something year olds and using their kind of knowledge
We use things like Tubular Labs
We pull a lot of data from social platforms Facebook, YouTube and Google so it’s a bit of a blend.
We do a lot of qualitative and focus groups to really get under the skin of what consumers think and what’s in their mind
I learn a lot from just talking to entry papers
Obviously trade press
I am obsessed with Twitter
Social media. Twitter and Linkedin gives you a very quick snippet and a slightly different take to what you might get from the trade press
I’d also say podcasts increasingly if you want a deep dive
Industry network of friends who I can tap into
More senior contacts I have in other businesses
Beyond that; standard campaign industry news
I get a lot of inspiration from what other people are talking about and getting ideas and suggestions from within the industry
Having a great marketing team so I’m supplied weekly with that I should be aware of
Being inquisitive and listening to podcasts is one of the best ways to open yourself up to broad tranches of information
Marketing team
Also from the research outputs we then deliver in order to solve the challenges that they have
Trade media like Campaign, The Drum, Marketing Weekly, City AM
Podcasts
Talking to senior people and actually having a coffee with them and getting under their skin to ask them a little bit about their business
Read the FT everyday
Google searches
By employing a great team who are experts in each of the various sectors and learning from them
Consultancy
Events
Reading online
I love reading books and read a lot of them
Employing young people who are sadly no longer in my demographic. But they can tap in that knowledge who inherently know the language, what people are consuming and that’s really valuable
Agency blogs and industry news
Taking into account the entertainment and technology news as well as advertising