Thoughts, Ideas, Opinions ... » Spotting marketing trends at Ad:Tech

We just spend two days at the Ad:tech London conference in London where we had a Webjam booth (photos coming soon…) to showcase our Branded Services offering allowing brands and organisations to set-up their own branded social networks. Back to back meetings, seminars and countless product demos gave us fantastic insight about the trends that shake the media industry. What amazed me most is how the industry is getting polarized around two extremes :

• the cold and rationale user acquisition business where hard numbers are the main story and where every agency, ad networks or metrics company promise to compute any ROI you can dream of to the finest details;
• the softer ways to harness social media by encouraging user to contribute, participate, if not take over the discussion and evangelization about a product or services through its brand values.

The very thing that seems to have disappeared, at least from the online world, is proper branding campaigns that have been squeezed out of the equation by CPA and CPC on one hand and viral social media on the other hand. While we all know branding campaigns are still alive and kicking in the other media (just look at any paper or TV or radio channel and indeed the big portals homepages), I heard in a panel Nigel Morris, CEO of Digital Marketing Agency Isobar, make a very good case that agencies need to adapt to a fundamental trend : Marketing is going to move away from being campaign-driven, ie where you generate sporadic bursts of interest, to continuous engagement/business interaction, ie where you build a recurring sustainable relationship between the client and the brand. The whole game then is about fostering environments where you can encourage “brand conversations”.
I actually don’t believe pure branding campaigns are going to disappear as there will always be the need for new products or services to be introduced to their target audience; but seeing user engagement heralded by big agencies as the next big thing is obviously music to my ears as this is exactly what Webjam allows organisations to achieve. That probably also explains why our “Branded social networks made easy” tagline generated so much interest on our booth, from trade organisations to publishing companies, gaming or e-commerce sites looking to engage and empower their members, audience or clients.