will blog for food...

To the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday for a bloggers brunch co-hosted by Chinwag and the Dept of Trade and Investment.
Uk Trade and investment is a government organisation that helps British businesses to develop in overseas markets through various resources and services.

This year they are looking at helping the 'creative' industries ie arts, music, film and the digital media industry.
Full info can be found at www.uktradeinvest.co.uk

By way of an introduction a number of bloggers, podcaster and digital media types were invited for a meet and greet. Presumably the assembled members of the chattering (or twittering) classes were selected as being likely to blab their findings.

No man blogs for free though, and the dti did their chances of a favourable review no harm whatsoever by the inclusion on the buffet menu of...

Fish Finger Sandwiches. Genius.

Thinking of unlikely sandwich combos, I'm reminded of back in the day (in what seems like a previous life) when I was a club dj, after my regular Sunday night gig I would head over to the taxi queue via the all-night baker where a sandwich of a scotch pie between 2 rowies (google it) would be devoured in the cab home. Health city.

Any good sandwich stories out there? (this is drivel - Editor's voice)

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Twittering at the back of the class…

I was caught twittering at the back of the class last week at Chinwag's ‘Tomorrow’s Ad Formats’ session.

I suppose I thought it was acceptable after following the entertaining commentary on the Ad Age digital advertising conference by David Armano and Steve Rubel last week.
For me, Twitter is starting to develop and find it’s place this year.
One of it’s interesting uses is as a back channel to events which enables other users to follow events remotely.

I did, however, find the bulk of the content at this particular Chinwag a bit flat and shared the odd tweet to that effect with a couple of other attendees.
I’d hoped to get the usual insight and inspiration that comes out of those sessions but the debate seemed centred around the various forms of interruption based traditional digital advertising - and the merits of this banner vs that pre-roll - rather than new ways for brands to actually engage and involve their customers.

By engage I guess I’m referring to the idea of collaborative marketing, conversation, dialogue, partnership etc rather shouting at people who are not interested.

Wikipedia says: ‘Rather than looking at consumers as passive receivers of messages, engagement marketers believe that consumers should be actively involved in the production and creation of marketing.”

I’m also often prone to wheeling out a slightly older nugget to illustrate this point

Confucious: ‘Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I might remember but involve me and I’ll understand’

Steven from our place, who was on the panel, fought a valiant battle
(I almost typed ‘shone like a Beacon’) to bring the conversation round to this notion of engagement being key however despite a few gratuitous cluetrain references from some of the others it didn’t fly.

I overheard this stat recently:
The number is flaky, I can’t exactly remember but it went something like…

‘…our research found 25% of users found pre-roll ads less annoying than mid-roll’

Yes he really did say, less annoying!

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