We all know how great British ads are, right? So here we are at Ad:Tech London, perhaps the world’s largest conference and exchange of all things in the ‘new media’ space to see how they are tackling the convergence of advertising and technology. Along with the impressive list of conference speakers, there are hundreds of online companies here to present and promote the ‘next big thing’ for the word wide web. What is interesting is that there are two streams of attendees here this week. Free and paid. I know what your saying, I hope you’re smart enough to be going for free because it sure would suck to pay when others are going for free. Well, in fact, we paid, but bear with me — we did the right thing.

The free stream, let’s call them the ‘masses’, have restricted access. Although, they do have access to about 75% of all the content (including the trade show and about 200 presentations), they can’t get at the really good stuff. Their content is made up entirely of ‘commercial’ content. That is to say everyone they interface with is selling one of their products or services. Each booth is of course expounding the virtues of their new ‘e-widget’. And every presentation is introduced by a show sponsor and then presented by a company (such as Orange Mobile) who has presumably paid for the privilege to speak to a captive audience.

On the other hand, the paid stream, we’ll call them the ‘privileged’, get to attend another 30 or so presentations with far more balanced content. The impressive panelist and speakers (from companies like Nike, The Guardian, Leo Burnett, you get the idea) are presenting and debating all the same stuff but are filtering the content through real world experiences. The whole thing is analogous to the big mess we are in. You can get all the information you want for free, but you will be left to your own devices to make sense of it, or you can pay a premium and have some ‘editors’ help you sift through the clutter.

Over the next few days, Leslie and I will blog on a number of the topics. Here are some of the issues covered at the conference today that we’ll blog about tomorrow:

1. Work all your brand assets online and offline.

2. Digital media allows companies to identify and enable their brand evangelists.

3. Brands are like a strong nest … they’re lovingly built with twigs, scraps and hard work.

4. Marketing has gone from a parent/child relationship to a peer-to-peer relationship.

Stay tuned.

Cheers from London,

Mark

I've been in the marketing game for almost 25 years now and the most valuable thing I've learned is that I have a whole lot more to learn. I started off in sales and worked my way up (so I thought) to advertising. In hind sight, I realize that sales was the top! You can have sales without advertising, but advertising without sales is just useless art. When Trampoline Branding was formed, we set out with that firmly planted in our minds. Now more than ever we need to keep it very simple for consumers. Good thing, I'm a very simple guy!