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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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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Hi, I am a Corby Classic.

I was won in a raffle, but my owner prefers skirts to trousers. I have been used a little experimentally and I can certainly press a trouser. I’m just not very good at anything else.

I have a little timer thing, rather like an egg timer, so you can leave me to happily press a trouser for up to 45 minutes without burning anything. Something my archrival ‘The Iron’ can’t claim to be able to do. Unlike an egg timer, though, I don’t click seconds or go ‘ping!’ when the trousers are ready. My little red light goes off and that’s it.

I suppose you could press other things in me… flowers… tea towels… crumpled newspapers.  So perhaps a hippy with an obsessive-compulsive disorder would be interested.  You will need a car to carry me, though, as I’m pick-up only.

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Our client Swinton has over a million customers for which they have an email address and we had been working with them for a few months on some of their product focused emails.  We knew that there was much more they could be doing with email marketing and wanted to push the boundaries for them.  Our triggered email activity was first discussed in January when we received a nice timely email from Pizza Express offering BOGOF on all pizzas to celebrate the fact that the snow was finally melting and people were now able to get out to eat again. This triggered our own thoughts – “Wouldn’t it be great if our Swinton emails could be a bit more timely and relevant and well…. interesting really!”

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At the beginning of every year marketing experts begin to predict what they think will be the next big thing in marketing and advertising. In the past we have had the year of the mobile, the year of Twitter and the year of Social Marketing. Yet in 2011 in the UK, it could be that it’s not something new and technologically advanced that is the next big thing but something tried and trusted… the VAT-free direct mail pack.

Thanks to George Osborne’s planned rise in VAT on 4th January from 17.5% to 20%; it could be that the marketing departments for financial services clients turn to the good old VAT-free pack to help stretch their budget further.

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Before I start this blog, I’ve set myself some ground rules. Simply because I know there are lots of blog postings, articles and galleries on the web dedicated to really funky and creative business cards. There is nothing wrong with these cards… it’s just that one of my biggest niggles about fancy business cards is that they don’t fit in my business card holder, or my wallet for that matter!

Ok that may be a bit old fashioned of me. But I like my business card holder. It serves the lovely purpose of holding lots of business cards that I can flick to in an instant. The only problem with it is that if the card is larger than 3.5 × 2 inches… I have to get the scissors out, or it just gets lost. And until someone invents a business card app for my iPhone, I’m going to stick to paper.

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Fire up the Quattro

My name is Steve White.  I’ve had an accident and I’ve woken up in 1982.  Am I mad, in a coma or have I gone back in time…. or has the advertising world gone nostalgia mad!?! Well, although my wife will certainly vouch for madness.  I can confirm that the latest trend in advertising is leading me to have my very own ‘Ashes to Ashes’ moment.

It simply can’t have escaped your attention as to just how many big British retailers have gone ‘nostalgic’ with their campaigns over the last year or two.  M&S, Persil, Virgin, Hovis, Milky Way and John Lewis have all used campaigns that hark back to their past.  But why are so many brands going down this creative route?  Why are so many brands looking back and not looking forward?

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Our recent farce of a general election, where the bottom half of the UK turned blue and the top half red and yellow with some orange dotted around in between, brought it home to me how different the UK is and how we have gone back more to being four separate countries more than any time in our recent past. This has implications for us as marketers I believe that we need to take into account more.

Having spent the run up to, and the actual election, in Scotland it proved a very interesting experience. Travelling up through the country from Cambridgeshire – true blue agricultural East Anglia – into Yorkshire, Cumbria and then most of the length of Scotland, the blue conservative banners disappeared and the yellow banners (not of the Lib Dems) but of the SNP, started to appear everywhere.  Talking to Scottish friends, they feel very nationalistic and have no interest at all about what goes on in Westminster, identifying very strongly with the SNP and indeed that was borne out in the actual election result.

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We've come a long way baby!

TV ads. I have to say… I love them. They are the main reason I got into this business in the first place… to create some arresting TV Advertising that my mates might talk about down the pub. One thing that has always infuriated me about TV Advertising, however, has been the inability to really effectively target them like you could other forms of advertising.

Well, it looks like those little niggles I have could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to the thing that has been nicknamed Smart TV. Its real name is Targeted Substitutional Advertising (TSA) and it looks like it could be the thing to deliver accountability and personalisation that digital media advertisers have enjoyed for years.

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The phrase ‘time flies’ is testament to my experience at Red C. It’s been six months since I left and I still miss the place!

Before embarking on my annual festival trip to Glastonbury in the summer of 2008, I was elated to find out I had secured the Junior Account Executive placement. However, panic soon struck! As a student with no relevant, practical business experience I was naturally overwhelmed and nervous as to how I could make a positive contribution to Red C. Those insecurities soon disappeared when I realised I was surrounded by people (both in the account and creative departments) who were willing to help, advise and guide me if need be.

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