G’day! My name is Tom and I’m a digital marketer at Laser Red. On Wednesday 8th and Thursday 9th March, I attended my very first Marketing Week Live! Armed with a laptop I borrowed from my Nan (no joke) and my notebook, myself and Charlotte headed down to London.
It was my first Marketing Week Live event and my first marketing conference in general. I wasn’t sure what to expect, I assumed it would be a room of tech companies trying to sell their services. Although I wasn’t there for the exhibitors, I was there for the seminars!
The fantastic MWL app allowed me to schedule all the seminars I wanted to see. It even set 10-minute reminders before every single one, which was great! So it’s a huge thumbs up from me for the app! Over the course of the 2 days, I saw a total of 19 different seminars. They ranged from 15 minutes to 45 minutes each.
My Favourite Seminar
My favourite seminar was held by Jeremy Waite, an evangelist from IBM. The title of his talk was “The Future of Marketing” and it was absolutely mind blowing. His talk opened on a single, simple slide:
- Short Attention Spans – Use big ideas, small words and short sentences.
- Sacredness of Privacy – Respect people’s personal & family information.
- Speak the truth – In all your words, news and advertising.
He explained that this was his favourite slide, not because it’s relevant and written by IBM’s marketing team last month. But because it was first published in 1857 in the first book written about marketing. This blew me away. In 160 years NOTHING has changed about the basic principles of marketing.
He went on to explain how IBM Watson has been interacting with music producers to accumulate data and write songs. I started off taking notes, but quickly closed my laptop to soak in everything he had to say.
Most Informative Seminar
The seminar I feel I benefited most from would be “3 steps to increasing your email marketing conversions”. The speaker was Kath Pay. She is one of the World’s Top 50 Email Marketing Influencers, so she REALLY knows her stuff. I took more notes in her 1 seminar than I did for the entire first day! She gave out so much great content, it was extremely refreshing. I thought she had some amazing insights into subject lines, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say!
Unfortunately, some of the seminar speakers used their time to plug their own company and services. Each stage was full of eager, willing to learn marketers like me. So having to listen to 20 minutes of case studies was not what I expected from the event.
My main take away from the event was that no matter what you do, nothing is “wrong”. Marketing is about testing. Whether it’s through A/B testing or simply giving that Facebook ad campaign a go! Each “failed” campaign brings you closer to finding the needle in the marketing haystack.
Overall, it was an informative couple of days. Even if it did cost £7.50 for a pulled pork sandwich! I’m very much looking forward to putting into place what I have learnt over the 2 days.