Digital Day 2017: Review

Another event about digital marketing. Hurrah? You could probably spend every day of your working life attending training, workshop or a conference on the subject. But over the years the Marketing Society Scotland’s Digital Day has built up a reputation as truly being a must-attend event and this year’s was no different. In fact, it was undoubtedly the best yet.

I often find presentations can fall in to the “fascinating but dull” or “entertaining but empty” camps, but every single one of the day’s presenters struck a great balance. Vicky Brock literally bounced up and down with enthusiasm as she talked about how loyal customers can lose you money. Andrey Vinitsky presented bewildering spinning circles of wild colour to illustrate how visualising data leads to better decision-making. The Mac Twins and Dominic McGregor proved that being young can lead to people underestimating them as the super smart, innovative business people they are. And Paul Armstrong made us focus on the every decreasing number of years we have left in our lives, but in a rather surprisingly funny and life-affirming way.

But I thought it was worth picking out three key points that I took away from a fascinating day of presentations.

1.    “Do fewer things excellently”: When Phil Sutcliffe from Kantar said this, I wrote it down in CAPS, then underlined it, and put **stars around it**. That’s how much it hit home to me. It’s the sort of thing you know but you need to hear somewhere else to say it to fully believe it.

With so many channels, formats, networks and options in front of us now as marketers, the temptation is to do them all. Let’s do a TV ad, a radio platform, set up a social media community, make use of programmatic, add in some experiential, don’t forget outdoor, think about how podcasts might work, etc, etc, etc. Instead, what Phil stressed, is the importance of prioritising the “moments that matter”. What are the key touchpoints for your audience? Find that out and then double-down on them. If you slice the salami too thin, you’re not going to be left with anything for your target audience to chew on (that’s my terrible metaphor, not his).

2.    Tools are not enough to measure and evaluate: It wouldn’t be a marketing event without some discussion and debate about measurement and evaluation. Fran Cassidy spoke at length on this in relation to the IPA Social Works, a cross-industry body set-up to help us all develop a more robust approach to measuring social media activity. This is something that has kept me up at night since I first set-up the Bebo and MySpace pages for the youth charity I worked at over a decade ago. And while there are lots of (admittedly, very helpful) tools and software out there who can help you bring some kind of outcome-focussed quantification to your likes, comments, RTs and shares, Fran’s key point was that this will always need some amount of human analysis to get the real story. The robots are taking over the world yet, Alexa.

3.    The more things change… : The wonderful Claire Johnson from Media Scotland gave a great presentation focussed on content marketing and how a print giant has moved to also become a successful digital publisher. There was lots of useful insight in terms of SEO, use of video, the drawbacks of click bait, etc. However what struck me most is how the old rules of journalism have come back round again. As someone who did a post-graduate course in Journalism waaaay back at the start of this millennium (and had a “glittering” career in fish farming trade magazines before finding his true calling in comms and marketing), the classic rules still apply – what people want is content which is unique, timely, human-focussed and with images / video. That is just as relevant as it was writing in a fish farming magazine 17 years ago as it is writing for the Daily record online now.

Already looking forward to Digital Day 2018. No pressure…

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