Campaign

The ISBA conference yesterday was interesting.

Great setting for a conference - Lord's Cricket Ground - and a team of speakers that rattled through their innings like a late order England collapse with most of us not lasting any more than thirty minutes at the crease.

But that kept the excitement up and some pretty good knocks were played out.

The speakers that stuck in my mind were Richard Eyre, Nick Milligan and Justin Billingsley. Richard outlined a digital future where we can all have whatever we want, wherever we want it so long as we find a way of paying for it.

Richard is one of the best public speakers you can find anywhere because he just weaves a huge amount of brilliant stuff into an interesting story. Go see him if you can and see what you can pick up from him.

Nick Milligan talked about Sky's tech development and the impending arrival of 3DTV ... only 2-3 years away. He also mentioned a hugely important advance that is in Beta at the moment - the possibility of using the data collected from the Sky Box and the opt in from households to serve tailored advertising all the way down to an individual household level.

No. 67 sees the Zafira ad, No. 59 gets the Mazda one and I get another ad for a cheap bicycle. This has been a long time coming but it is nearly here.

They just have to beat IPTV to the punch and we could have an incredibly useful tool to get broadcast TV to work harder for us. And finally, Justin Billingsley who put a positive spin on the recession - learn to love it because it increases creativity, makes marketing more important and heightens the role of iconic brands in people's lives. Nice to hear someone looking on the bright side.

And you have to admire Michael Kassan, flown in from New York with his laconic lambasting of a certain big media owner which he delivered as a 'googly to Google'. Nice. An American using cricket terms at Lord's. Now if only Gordon Brown could have pitched a no-hitter to President Obama yesterday ...