EMS2014

This time last week, myself and Lisa took a day out of the office to attend the Event Marketing Summit (#EMS2014) at the Mermaid Theatre in London.

The summit was a launch event, focused on getting the events industry together to discuss best practice within marketing. To add to our interest in the topics being discussed, some of the speakers were clients so we were keen to show our support to them and to the industry as a whole, but most importantly to learn.

Overall, speaker quality was great, most were compelling and knowledgeable. The audience interactivity platform, sli.do (www.sli.do or @slidoapp on twitter) also deserves a mention. Enabling real time interaction without any interruption, the audience could pose questions and make comments which the speaker and host could address at the end of the session, after all there is nothing like listening to your audience…

Which leads me nicely to my next point, listening to your audience. This was very much a theme of the day, with almost all of the speakers advocating it as one of the best ways to develop brands and marketing strategies. One of my favourite quotes of the day was “your brand is what your customers say it is”, we couldn’t agree more. In fact, we spend most of our time helping our clients to find out what their customers think they are and think of them. We deliver insights which enable them to have the competitive edge in their markets. If you’d like to have the kind of business insights that provide direction and focus, then it’s about time we started talking!

Another speaker said it’s not enough for someone to experience something alone. With the growth of social media, we now need to share our experience and thinking about it, that’s exactly what I’ve just done!

Jonathan