Media Week

Yahoo's European marketing chief said its time for brands to change how they interact with customers. What does he mean? Well he wants brands to sell themselves rather than merely harping on about product features and pricing. "We have to change how we interact with customers. If we do not let them in then they will not stick with us," he told delegates. And its serious - consumers in the future will not be interested in brands who do not "let them in", he warns, by choosing not to embrace new digital marketing openings.

So with so many competing digital models out there - what is the right approach? Fahy himself admits that he dismissed Twitter a few years ago. But he says its all about choosing the service, platform or model, whatever, which is "now". "There will not always be a model for digital and we will not always get it right", he says, but most important is to pick the model which works currently.

Tristan O'Carroll

Decipher's Nigel Walley called on delegates to engage with Project Canvas, the planned VoD venture from BBC, ITV and BT. He said that for the ad industry Canvas could be either an opportunity or plain alarming as a lost opportunity. Canvas can, he said, bring Freeview and Freesat back into the "commercial sphere", referring to the BBC's attempts to make Freeview a success by making at as low spec as possible by precluding certain ad opportunities. Controversially, he said the BBC must not be allowed to run Canvas without the aqd industry taking a leading role, or else, he warned, a raft of commercial opportunities will be lost.

A call to arms indeed. Many delegates dont know what Canvas is, so, Nigel's comments are a timely intervention at a time when the BBC and ITV look to Canvas to do for TV what iPlayer did for online TV.

Tristan O'Carroll

And so Media 360 begins. WPP's Mark Cranmer opens proceedings noting how the world has changed. "We are now coming out of this age of consumption... and into the age of construction".

"As professionals this is quite tricky, but as consumers it's exciting."

Said advertisers need to understand what needs reconstructing out there within our media communications and our media environment. The audience has changed too, no longer can we assume that they're sitting there like a bunch of muppets ready to clap. Whether we're providing them with media content or advertising.

"Awash with Pollocks"

Said the media world didn't have very much colour from 1920s up until about 1989. It used to have very clear boundaries, and a very ordered structured environment. It was easy to assume where the audience was, what the cost might be and what the effect might be - and then this happened... Using a Pollock painting by way of backdrop, Cranmer went on to describe "explosion of diversity, colour, texture and truly magnificient constructive abilities that are out there" - as an analogy for changes in the world of communications.

But don't worry, apparently we don't actually need all that colour, but instead just need to be sure about what you are doing with the colour that is available. (Genius) - Individual bits of colour with the right integration can make a beautiful, coherent picture - his Pollock painting has morphed into a Monet (clearly not a Pollock fan).

"There could be money in the Monet" - but warns of tough decisions as we wrestle with this new environment. Agencies and advertisers need to know how to make the most effective use of budgets and media owners need to know what they should be investing and marketing to create and engage with consumers.

"There's never been a more exciting place to be... the reality of media is that audiences do love media... we just have to be really sure what it is we're gong to be doing with it."

Said the challenge is deciding how we nurture that audience how do we keep it coming back and how do we tend to it so that it continues to grow.

Arif Durrani

Media Week undertook inteviews with delegates while it was at Media 360 to find out what the industry thought, both of the event and the challenges facing clients, agencies and media owners over the coming year.

It makes for interesting viewing.

Two excellent presentations by The Economist publisher Andrew Rashbass and director of operations Alan Dunachie played heavily on the idea of, well, ideas.

Andrew focussed on the argument of mass intelligence – that while dumbing down may be a fact of life, there has never been a greater appetite for challenging media.

Whether it’s through trips to museums and theatres, watching highbrow films or reading broadsheet papers, more and more of us are consuming thought-provoking media.

And, further more, we’re ‘mixing and matching’ our high end consumption with more mainstream choices – read The Economist, say, on the tube home, then settle in to watch a Hollywood blockbuster when we get in.

It’s not a wholly new concept, but interesting nonetheless, and was explored more deeply in the ‘Ideas People’ breakout session with Dunachie. It’s hard to argue against a presentation in which video clips of some of the world’s most successful people are pressing home the point, but Alan had some interesting things to say about the value of ideas.

Suggesting that approximately 75 percent of a company’s value is ideas is fairly compelling, as was the research looking at the path a message or idea takes through its various stages of development and the people who make that happen – the “pioneers, catalysts and builders”.

When asked what was the single most important trait of successful people, the answer, according to Dunachie, was curiosity. It was an interesting conclusion to draw and a presentation well worth seeing if you get the opportunity.

Which, if you work for a certain agency whose MD I spoke to afterwards, you may get an opportunity sooner that you think. Impressed at what he saw, his intention was to invite Dunachie in to speak to the troops.

The ultimate conclusion to the tale, however, arrived this morning. A room drop of fruit, Lucozade and Tic-Tacs, along with a pamphlet entitled, ‘Some ideas to help with tomorrow’s problems’ containing a list of the top ten hangover cures from around the world.

My favourite among the varied remedies, from an under arm lemon rub to salted cucumber juice, was the suggestion from Haiti to stick 13 black-headed pins in the cork of the bottle that gave you the hangover.

I haven’t tried it, but I can’t help thinking that if I was actually in Haiti, and not South Wales at a media conference, I wouldn’t be hungover in the first place.

The highlight of Friday morning’s session, the final of this year’s Media 360 conference, was undoubtedly Dennis Turner, chief economist at HSBC Bank.

Amid a stream of cracking one-liners, Turner expertly spelled out his analysis and predictions for the economy.

And while noting that consumers were tightening their belts, he said he believed a recession was only likely if we talked ourselves into one.

Also speaking this morning was Steve King, chief executive of ZenithOptimedia. King spoke about the need for agencies to review their revenue models, and also to prove their value to clients.

Despite the challenging times, however, King said there was ‘no putting the toothpaste back into the tube’ when it came to creative and media agencies. Having a creative agency within a group of companies was one thing, but there was no going back to a full-service model.

King finally laid out what he saw as the six major threats facing media agencies: the economy, silo working, the speed of change, the digital bubble, the race for talent and commoditisation.

What links a monkey, suicide and a decent cuppa? Rachel Bristow, marketing communications and buying director at Unilever, speaking at Media 360, enlightened us on the connection.

When describing the media mix Unilever used when it resurrected the PG Tips monkey, Rachel spoke at length about the role of their online marketing activity, which included building a MySpace page for Mr Monkey, the stuffed character who has replaced the famous PG Tips chimps.

As she pointed out, when you put your brand out into the social space, there are times when people co-opt it for things that you’re not overly keen on. In this case, the monkey star appeared on www.monkeysuicide.com, a site which counts the numbers of ways a monkey can be ‘sacrificed’.

It’s actually a fun site, and not as bad as the name suggests, but it’s a good example of the online world taking a brand and mashing its message for its own amusement. In the end, Unilever decided not to take any action over the site and let it ride.

It was a good decision. The social media is not something that’s controllable, a point also made by Nigel Walley, managing director of Decipher, who earlier chaired the ‘New Technologies: New Challenges?’ panel. Nigel also opened an interesting debate over the word ‘digital’, more of that later.

The keynote from Jonathan Mildenhall, vice president global advertising and creative excellence at Coca-Cola, followed by a casebook on Cadbury’s much-spoofed gorilla campaign kicked off Thursday’s proceedings at Media 360.Mildenhall’s explanation of Coca-Cola’s transmedia storytelling approach, the “art of extending an ad or piece of entertainment across multiple platforms” provided an insightful opening to the conference.

The company is looking at how the media campaign can itself become revenue generating and alongside Coca-Cola’s Happiness Factory campaign, Mildenhall drew on examples including Burger King’s ‘The King’ character which has fronted video games and will soon be featuring in a Hollywood production.

His excellent presentation was followed by a panel including Lucy Evans, brand manager of Dairy Milk, Laurence Green, chairman of Fallon, and Howard Watson, group account director at Starcom, looking at the 2007 campaign of the year, the drumming gorilla.

Green explained how the brief from Cadbury, ‘to get the love back’ into Dairy Milk and to look at how the creative could provide a similar moment of joy to that experienced when enjoying the chocolate provided the inspiration for the gorilla ad.

A video compiling just a few of the many spoofs that have been created and shared on sites such as YouTube demonstrated just how much buzz the ad created, and the perpetuating nature of the simple creation.

Watson’s description of the media plan, focussing initially on anticipation – ‘He’s been waiting for this moment for all his life’ – gave some background to how the buzz was created. A press campaign flagging a scheduled TV slot before the first show of the returning Big Brother provided the lift off, and subsequent TV slots around the England Rugby World Cup adventure led to the ad achieving an unprecedented and prolonged amount of coverage.

Well, the figure was actually a little further south of that, but as Mark Palmer, founder of Maverick Planet, clearly pointed out, to focus group a set of people of the calibre of those in the room at the time would have cost a pretty penny, and the answer probably more.

Mark suggested about 50 grand would have bought the answers you can see below. The question was ‘what’s the one thing you would like to address in media?’ and the answers, called out from the audience of media agency and media owners bosses, were really interesting.

The top ten in the spot poll are, hopefully, legible in the picture, but clearly, technology, talent and the value for money are high on the agenda for everyone at this year’s conference. 

Tomorrow’s keynotes and panels will no doubt provide some of the solutions to the issues on the board.

With delegates streaming into the Celtic Manor resort in Wales, this year's Media 360 conference is well and truly underway.

Roger Parry, executive chairman of Media Square PLC, (pictured), made the welcome address to delegates just a short time ago, managing to express himself eloquently in Welsh.

Quite how much of this was understood by the audience is unclear, but comparing his attempts to a Steve Barrett Leader was greeted with a more than a few laughs.

Following Roger's address, Mark Palmer, founder of Maverick Planet, led a speed networking session, preceded by an interesting Q&A with the gathered crowd, asking the question, 'what is the one thing that you would address in media?'

With answers ranging from recruitment issues, copyright to Google and technology, it was a great snapshot of the kind of problems people are likely to be discussing over the next few days.

Read on for all the latest news from this year's Media 360 conference.

We'll be publishing news and views from the event, starting 14 May and hopefully giving those not lucky enough to be there a bit of an insight into what it's like when the great and good of media get together to debate the issues of the day.

If you want to join us there are still delegate places available here.