Tonight, I fly back to Blighty having spent over 3 weeks in North America.
5 days in New York for Search Engine Strategies, a weekend in Boston with friends, 3 days in Toronto doing some press and 10 days in Seattle having a ton of meetings and planning sessions for our next fiscal year which starts in July.
That’s a lot of time away from home but a fascinating trip from the point of view seeing if there’s any difference between approaches to the economic difficulties we’re all experiencing.
And really, there isn’t much of a difference!
Over here you hear on the radio that millions of people have lost their jobs. The head of tax returns in the US was saying this morning that they have a whole load of measures in place to help people who are going to have difficulty paying the government what they owe.
Things seem much more expensive too, even when you include the drop in exchange rate from $2 to $1.40 to the pound. I don’t spend as much time in Gap and American eagle when I’m in town now!
All the talk at the conferences and internal meetings I had was about how to survive the downturn. The advice was good. Very solid. But a constant theme was that online advertising would pull many brands though the next couple of years. The optimism is palpable which is great news.
One of the best presentations I saw at SES in New York was by Jack Flanagan, Executive Vice President at comScore
His last slide had the following tips for online marketers to survive the choppy economic waters:
- Know your customer and their mindset
- Know the market
- Don’t under estimate the power of paid search
- Powerful combo with display advertising
- Be consistent
- Be patient
All but 3 and 4 are common sense no? Why does it need to be re-iterated time and time again?
We’re going through a massive re-calibration at the moment both in our personal and professional lives and it ain’t just the UK – we’re all in it together!
PS: Any one want any gummy bears bringing back?
