iMedia Brand Summit distant memories

Wow, a week goes fast these days.

This time last week I was cramming to get jobs out the way before I rushed off to the Blue Mountains for the iMedia Brand Summit. My last post was about the presenters from Tuesday morning, and its now Monday after already.

I loved Jenny Williams' summary of the greatest challenges for the industy - motivating change.

It is however still all about the creative idea and with the lines blurring between media, creative and strategy, that idea can come from anywhere - its just about the conversation that helps we service providers gets to the core of the business challenge.

The challenge for many marketing service providers today though is that despite the "20+ years" in the industry, they don't have the same value proposition in the fast-changing digital media landscape.

Jenny provided a great example of a simple stone-masonary business leading the charge with his use of web 2.0 tools to grow his business beyond the yard he's working in and into Education, (for those that haven't seen it, he's using Ning as a platform - something we've used on a few solutions this year).

And as a great Jedi once said, "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side". It is certainly time for clients getting advice on this space from traditional agencies to look around for more qualified help.

The Summit format offered many opportunities for conversations with peers in the Australian Digital Marketing industry and I had a great chat with Christian Bartens from Datalicious in the break. A very clever dude doing some amazing things with data and analytics.

Sat in on a few 'spotlight' sessions after lunch.

Fionn Hyndman from DGM gave a tannin-impared presentation on customer acquisition strategies. Their speal is that they are a wholly owned subsidiary of Deal Group Media Plc UK. To quote the website, the company's principal activity is the provision of online marketing services through the mediums of performance based marketing, search engine positioning, optimisation and marketing services, including the provision of competitive intelligence gathering services.

Ian Gardiner from Viocorp showed the crowd why their business has doubled in size in the last 12 months. Their tools are driving some of the best examples of integrated video content in Australia.

Nice to be representing them West of the Blue Mountains.

Trolling through my notes from the Summit, there were many "Nuggets" that I hoe to share over the weeks ahead.