This year is the 25^th anniversary of a very significant event for me, an event that has led directly to me being here today.

In 1986, as a young direct marketer working for home shopping giant GUS, I was lucky enough to attend the Montreux Symposium, on the Lake Geneva shoreline (as Deep Purple put it).  At the time, the week-long Symposium was the biggest event in Europe for the direct marketing industry, and attracted some major speakers.  But for me, the single most significant session, one that profoundly affected my approach to direct marketing, was a ground-breaking live demonstration and seminar by Professor Siegfried Vogele, founder of the Institute of Direct Marketing in Munich that is now owned by Deutsche Post.

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The use of eye tracking in the research environment is growing significantly as a result of major advances in the sophistication, power and ease of use of the technology, according to Tommy Strandvall, the Global Training Manager for Tobii Technology at the Tobii Eye Track UX Conference held in London on the 9^th and 10^th of June.  Certainly, there was a real buzz about the conference on the day that my colleague Rosemary and I attended as speakers to deliver a session on findings from a major email eye tracking study that Red C is undertaking in 2011.

In fact, Tommy set a very high bar with his own presentation at the opening of the second day of the conference, with some remarkable live demonstrations of beta technologies, including a much-anticipated Tobii set-up to eye track mobile devices such as smartphones and iPads.  We enjoyed a live demonstration of Tobii Glasses, a lightweight eye tracker capturing data on a device not much bigger than a smartphone.

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Is it just me, or are adverts more irritating these days? All you want to do after a long day’s work is to come home, put your feet up, and relax by watching a little TV. But just when you’ve gotten comfy and begin to unwind, suddenly you’re assaulted with blasts of ‘GO COMPARE! GO COMPARE!’ and you know you just have to get up and go to the trouble of making yourself a brew, just to avoid the whole experience.

Sound familiar?

And it’s not just Go Compare. Thickly accented meerkats plague our screens; break-dancing newsreaders promise to buy our cars from us. Excitable people in coffee shops tell us that a computer system was their idea. Are you irritated yet?

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Picking up from where Julian left off on Day 1, I started my day at Earls Court by throwing myself into a seminar on “stories of multichannel marketing success” and started to quickly understand why Julian had been so impressed the day before!

“Consumers now have a megaphone”

Grabbed my attention straight away.  The marketing landscape has changed dramatically. If we only look back to the year 2000 – it is enough to make me feel like I have been part of a pretty impressive revolution! Previously as marketers we all focused on a “push” strategy, we planted ideas in consumers heads, told them what to believe, and what to buy. The interaction was all one way and we just kept on banging our big marketing drums!

Times have changed…

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Technology. It does not like to stand still does it. In fact it makes me smile that if we grabbed someone from ten years ago and dropped him or her in the middle of the Technology for Marketing & Advertising Expo at Earls Court in London… they would probably think they were at least 100 years in the future.

It’s very easy to walk round here and look at some stands and just say ‘Wow, that’s clever’. It’s also very easy to attend some talks that really get your mind racing with the possibilities for your clients… so it’s probably a good job I’m spending today and tomorrow here then!

Thanks to it being painfully slow to get in, I missed the special keynote presentation from Google. From what I could gather, they are saying mobile phones are the future and they were amazed how many people relied on mobile browsing during the ash cloud crisis of 2010.

Anyway, despite missing that talk, here’s what I did manage to listen in on, on day one.

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Can you spot Steve White in this old school picture?

I was never a big fan of school.  For me it was a time of premature balding, cross country running and trying not to lose a finger during wood class lessons.  So when I was asked by Adrian (Red C’s Chairman) to repeat year 12….just kidding, so when I was asked by Adrian to attend a Business Enterprise day at Mirfield Free Grammar & Sixth Form I was a little apprehensive.  Would Business Enterprise day involve any sort of cross country running or would I be asked to build a jewellery box using just my wits, a piece of balsa wood and a blunt chisel?

Well as it turned out my return to school wouldn’t involve any balsa wood or indeed blunt chisels.  I was in fact being asked to support Mirfield’s very own take on BBC’s Dragon’s Den.  As part of the  Business Studies GCSE recruitment drive they wanted to showcase just how interesting and at times enjoyable business can be.  So the Business Studies Department alongside Business Enterprise put together a day in which their Year 9 students would work together on developing a business proposal for the launch of a “green” product of their choice.  This proposal would then be presented to a panel of local “business experts” or dragons.  I was very pleased and indeed flattered to be asked to be one of those dragons.

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After all the pigging out over the festive period, lots of us are worrying about our expanding waist belts, cursing the extra mince pies on our hips and making New Year’s resolutions to hit the gym and get our bodies back in shape in time for our Easter holiday. But looking around, maybe we don’t need to keep striving to achieve that washboard stomach. Maybe fat is the new thin? Maybe it’s time you discovered the world of Marketing to the larger lady.

It seems like curves are in fashion all of a sudden. We’re seeing a growing trend in the use of plus-size models on the runways, in magazines and as part of advertising campaigns. And according to Yildiz Blackstone, the president of Luca Luca, “fashion is cyclical, but this is a trend that is going to stay… it is healthy to have curves.”

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A great movie tagline

I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a big film buff, I’ll hold off on going as far as to call myself a Geek… but let’s put it this way; if you came up against me in a movie quiz I’d quite happily put money against me beating you.

One thing I love just as much as the movies, however, is some of the increasingly clever ways that we are told of a movie’s impending release. From some great copy lines to superb looking adverts to online viral campaigns that play with you; here are a few of my favourite campaigns… feel free to share some of your favourites too!

A simple start… a great line of copy

Before we get into all this new fangled web stuff I thought I would share with you my absolute hands down favourite copy line of any movie poster I have ever seen. Yes, to me it really is that good. And it’s a line of copy that is widely accepted to have contributed to a huge rise in ticket sales for what was essentially a B-movie.

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Back in November I attended the NatMag 100 conference at the Saatchi Gallery in London. One of the many interesting talks on the day was by the Future Foundation, who highlighted a few emerging audiences such as Media Madonnas and Digital Divas… audiences who are becoming increasingly hard to sell to thanks to the way they consume their media… essentially these people are disengaged.

It can’t have failed to escape you that over the last few years more and more consumers are becoming disengaged. Many of them sit at home watching the TV with their Smartphone by their side or their laptop or iPad on their knee surfing the web as they catch up on their favourite soaps! In fact it is common knowledge that as a result of this, these consumers are no longer saying, “persuade me and I’ll buy from you” they are saying, “entertain me and I’ll engage with you”.

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A great opportunity to get a postcard pin-up in a blog article

25 – 35 – 35. These are not the vital statistics of some ill-proportioned beauty contest winner. They actually refer to the number of characters we, as Adwords advertisers, have to play with when trying to get a message across to a potential customer.  Needless to say, when it comes to writing Adwords ads, every character counts.

What makes a good ad?

The first and hardest rule is relevance. If your ad is not relevant to your user’s search query you’ll miss out on a lot of potential clicks. So how do you make your ad relevant? Well the first thing to do is ensure your keyword or phrase appears in the ad headline – and once in the content as well, ideally. This will ensure your keyword/phrase appears in bold on the search results page, helping your ad stand out from any non-optimised ones.

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