Welcome to Optimism this morning attended the ‘Brands’ day of the Digital Shoreditch Festival so that you don’t have to. The theme of the event is “marketing, advertising and social – the best that London has to offer in all sectors from consumer goods to the environment”. Speeches so far have covered a wide range of different – and occasionally somewhat loose – interpretations of this theme. Key things that occur to me from watching a morning of this stuff:

– Blimey, these agency case history videos are all the same. (Yes, yes, we at W+K do them too.) They are mainly irrelevant to the audience and a great way of showing you haven’t actually tailored your presentation to the day’s event.

– Rehearse your presentation to make sure it fits into your time slot! Lots of presenters had to stop in mid-flow because they ran out of time, or rush through far too many slides for the slot they had been allocated.

– No more audience participation stunts, please.

Here are some brief notes on the morning’s presentations:

Mark Earles:

Strategic planner, author of “I’ll have what she’s having”.

The future of customer engagement and why it’s all about tapping into herd instincts.

Number one focus of marketing should be… people.

It’s very hard to change behavior.

There as a perhaps unnecessary degree of audience participation in order to make the point about social influence on behavior, including mass jumping up and down – like the social influence of the Meg Ryan character in When Harry Met Sally, whose faked orgasm prompts everyone in the restaurant to order the cheesecake. But it was an entertaining and interesting talk.

Patou Nuytemans

EAME Chief Digital Officer, Ogilvy

Big, brands don’t need to be boring, they can be bold.
Theme here was that branded content is the future. Illustrated with Ogilvy case histories: a stunt around the Tunisian elections (which didn’t seem to be relevant to the talk), an AmEx  promotion that helped people to discover hidden talents and covered the results via long-form content, and an AI app called Watson for IBM that competed on US Game Show Jeopardy. Lots of talk about Cannes and Clio awards. (It always seems to be the big networks who go on about awards shows.)

Jeremy Waite

Head of Social Strategy, TBG Digital (“Facebook’s biggest advertiser in the world.”)

Are you really engaging your customers?
“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget the way you made them feel.” Maya Angelou

His key point: “Social media is the one area in which you don’t need to outspend your competitors to win” (Highly debatable – smarter ideas can generate more impact in any medium!)

Example of Dollar Shave: whose funny viral video apparently led to the company being valued at $12m within 3 months

Kam Star

Managing Director Grape Digital

Converting customers through play.

Games fulfil basic human desires: acceptance, curiosity, honour, independence, power, social contact, status – can drive greater engagement and involvement for brands.

Examples of successful gamification: Bamboozle Fest, Devhub, and others.

Apparently they handed out free decks of gamification playing cards – but I didn’t get mine!

Isabelle Quevilly

Strategy Director, venturethree

Ad Crafting Updated

Transmedia – the days of ‘integrated advertising’ are over. ‘Integrated’ fills in gaps, it doesn’t create conversations. Transmedia storytelling is inspired by entertainment and gaming industries – not about one idea in deifferent channels – multiple ideas expressing one brand.

Advertising – simple is best (cheapest) but this is losing efficiency. People are smart and enjoy complexity. Non-linear stories, involving crowds to build narrative, feeding flows of information everywhere. (But went so fast it was hard to follow!)

Jon Walsh

Mobile Ventures

Soundbite prediction: “TV’s going online and online is going mobile.

Anthony Tattum

MD, Big Cat Group

Newness, otherness and snake oil: locating ROI from social media

His top tips seemed to be: have a strategy, have clear objectives, measure results against these objectives. Er, that’s pretty much it.

Hassan Mizra

Social Media Consultant, HeyHass.com

The Curator Generation: driving engagement through Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram.

Key points here seemed to be:

– people today have no patience for text, they want pictures

– they want to connect with others with shared interests

– great visuals drive engagement

– and use hashtags

Christophe Mallet

Social Media Strategist, Carve Consulting

Facebook doesn’t enhance your real life the way it could. Next thing could be: socially augmented reality – a more intuitive way of understanding and anticipating your needs based on location, networks, likes, etc – a service that supports you rather than supporting advertisers.

Greg Mullen and Alastair Mills

Creative Leads, AKQA

Case study – Nissan campaign for India. “The new star of India”. This was a competition to appear in a Bollywood movie, via auditions posted on Facebook and voted on by the public. It seemed like and odd choice of case history for this event.

Matt Morgan

MD, Moonshine Media

Socially conscious media for digitally savvy people.

Shared a case history for the Prince’s Rainforest Project involving a range of celebrities encouraging people to get involved with saving the rainforests. He kept pointing out that it was done in 2009 but would be done differently in 2012. Which just made me wonder why he didn’t show something more recent.

Lindsey Greig and Simon MacDougall

Data Guidance / Promontory

Social media, apps and cookies

Talked about data and privacy. One interesting thing: an app called Clueful that advises you how much of your personal data is being shared by each of your other apps. If you want to know such a thing.

Lauren Dyer

Head of New Media, Superglue

Showed a US case history for Adidas basketball using Facebook. Her brief tips were:

– be consistent

– remember to focus on your objective

– you have to give to get (reward interaction)

– be innovative

Leon Tong

Director, Bright Lemon

From 0-100,000 users in an hour

Unfortunately, the talk didn’t actually explain how to achieve the promise in its title. He just explained that his agency uses social theory to build networks that connect communities of like-minded people.

They made us all do this. When we signed in we had to write our name and who we wanted to connect with at the event. You can't read my wee sign (above) but, hilariously, it says "WLTM Juliette Binoche". That didn't work out.

That’s all the notes I managed to get down so far. May have to return to the office at this point and do some work…