This year marked the 7th annual Adido Attention Summit, taking place at The Hilton in Bournemouth. We brought together 200 marketing professionals to enjoy some top industry speakers, workshops, and seminars. As chief of dictionary corner, I get a first hand, behind the scenes view of the love and effort that goes into Attention, so if you were unable to experience the full force of excellence from our speakers and the Adido team this year, or want to relive the day, worry not, I’m going to sum up the 320+ slides into this blog right now.
Daley Thompson CBE - former british decathlete & owner of Daley Fitness
We were so honoured to invite Daley to our summit this year and to say his talk was excellent doesn’t do it justice. Daley answered questions regarding his gold winning experience in decathlon, in not one but two Olympic games, alongside him breaking the world record four times! He also touched upon the topic of sport psychology and mental toughness: “You can’t turn a lamb into a lion, but you may be able to turn it into a fiercer lamb, you’ve either got the determination & skill to win or you don't.''
Daley's talk ended covering the difficulties of starting a business (Daley Fitness) and managing a team, challenges which I think resonated with a lot of our attendees.
Olly Rzysko - Director of Marketing & Operations for Haekels and previously Head of Digital at Primark
Key takeouts: Be authentic. Be loyal to fans. Keep it simple. Check your homework - “Always check what is going out on your social ads, it is gruelling and annoying, but one bad message can change people’s perception of your brand.”
Olly spoke about the importance of emotion in marketing and how it resonates most with audiences. Using lyrics from Whitney Houston, he explained how we’ve now got more channels than ever. More moments than ever. More room for mistakes. Despite not needing as much budget.
To get around these problems his advice was:
- To be authentic - never lie to your customers & don’t pretend to be something you’re not;
- Don’t confuse activity with effectiveness;
- Embrace the fandoms! - Real people like things that are familiar, we love the things we know. We are all fans of something, so find the fans, and have fun!
Emotion is so important in what we do. Olly asked us..."How are we making people feel?”
Tom Barker - Head of Digital, National Trust
Tom spoke to us about the digital transformation that the National Trust have gone through in the last 5 years & the difficulties they faced along the way. His talk centred on the 10 12 lessons learned from Digital Transformation.
His main advice was that you have to want it. It will only happen if you really want it to.
- Define 'digital' - he quoted from the RNLI who claim "For us digital has gone beyond marketing, it’s just the way we work" - for Tom, he believes "marketing people should just be digitally literate - digital is just a skill, not a marketing function”.
- It will only happen if you really want it to
- Have a single, clear objective - ‘If you can’t explain your pitch in a lift then it’s too long, your objective should be easy to sum up in a short space of time.’
- What motivates leaders? - Every leader is motivated for change differently, e.g. some leaders aren’t bothered if you can generate x amount more money, they’d be more interested in saving x amount more money.
- Chunk it up - determine how much the change is worth, and how fit for purpose existing activity is - organise and prioritise your workload based on these assessments and decisions
- It's a long haul - don’t expect change to happen overnight
- Get a big stick! - sometimes you need to be a bit more forceful in encouraging change ;-)
- There will be failures, don't take it personally
- Invest in IT
- Plan beyond delivery, after your websites have gone live, what about maintaining it?
- You'll have to start all over again - think of your plan like a car, it'll need MOTs, parts will degrade and need replacing, new technologies will arrive to add or detract from what you're currently doing, so don't transform and leave it - continually evolve
- It really will only happen if you really want it to!
Luke Pratsides - Digital development NHS
Luke spoke about increasing demand and increasing complexity in the NHS. The main goal for them is efficiency and changing expectations.
- Omnichannel, delivering the appropriate service through the appropriate channel when necessary
- Imagine a world where health can be transformed through big data and prediction analytics - people will be able to anticipate how healthy they’ll be in the future or how they’ll respond to a particular medicine or operation. As a result, they will be able to make better-informed decisions about their lifestyle and health choices.
- Chatbots used for appointment booking.
- Taking a preventative rather than reactive approach into helping people with their health.
- Improved web pages, better content easier to navigate because you can’t stop people from Googling their symptoms but you can give them accurate information as the top result from Google.
David Berendt vs Tom Crewe Adido - PPC vs SEO
The boys tackled a few points in this debate, including speed of implementation. David covered how he set up a PPC account from scratch with everything needed in 3 minutes and 42 seconds alongside the benefits of precise targeting with PPC. Tom countered with real-life examples of how in 1-2 months he drastically improved a client's performance using SEO. He also highlighted that despite the fact it takes time, SEO is so important for the performance of your site, which is a long term investment.
The second topic was getting ahead of the competition. David's argument for this was that with PPC you can constantly be above your competition and not to mention that in a mobile view, often you don’t see any organic results when you first search on Google until you scroll. He also covered the new exciting ways of advertising with shopping & more engaging ads that include images and instant buy options and the fact that you can be creative with the ad copy.
Tom took the approach of making your competitors' strengths your strengths. You can use learnings from your competitors to beat them in the SERPs and came prepared with a real-life example of how he took a client from page 4 to a high position on page 1. He also highlighted how with organic you can stand out from the competition. And the point that there are more organic results on a Google page than there are paid ads meaning there are more opportunities to show. He also touched upon the ‘dark-side’ of SEO.
The final argument was on justifying spend on both PPC and SEO, David hit this straight away that while you pay for clicks in PPC, the return on investment makes it a strong, viable option for your marketing strategy. He also highlighted how with PPC not too much extra support is needed from a development POV as we can use Google Tag Manager whereas a direct quote from Tom claims that he wouldn’t actually be able to do his job without a team of developers.
Tom started his answer with the fact that most people either don’t click ads or have ad blockers. He highlighted how there are less ongoing costs in implementing an SEO strategy. And ultimately as Tom pointed out, you own your website, and you should be interested in investing in what you own.
So if you weren’t there I’m sure you’re wondering who took the win... Tom, fighting on the side of SEO won the digital debate. If you'd like to learn a bit more our teams at Adido, you can find our PPC channel here, and our SEO channel here.
Influencer panel - Laura Edwards, Rhiannon Duffin, Hannah Solman & Chantelle Champs
This was exciting for us at Adido HQ because it’s a new format for us this year, since we don’t usually have a panel discussion.
Laura Edwards (Co-Founder of Viral Talent), Rhiannon Duffin (New Life Social), Hannah Solman (Farrow & Ball) and Chantelle Champs (social media influencer) joined Andy on stage to discuss how to find, work with, run and manage social media influencer campaigns. We heard from the ladies discussing their journey into influencer marketing and heard some controversial stories which definitely woke everyone up a bit after lunch! Unfortunately due to the debate over-running we were unable to pose questions to the panel, so we have promised to follow up with the ladies to get their responses and thoughts on what turned out to be a very opinionated subject matter! Watch this space...
Cephas Williams - 56 black men
Cephas shared a truly inspiring story of his journey and experiences leading up to his 56 black men campaign, we learnt the difficulties he’s faced and how he overcame every problem along the way. This was a fantastic talk to attend because you can fully see how passionate Cephas is about the work he’s doing to tackle racism especially in the eye of the media.
Tom Goodwin - Zenith USA
We closed the day with a nice G&T and listened to Tom Goodwin's thoughts on some going ons in the digital world including automation, AI, machine learning, brand purpose and much more!
Throughout the day the Adido team also held training cinema-themed workshops which were incredibly insightful.
Robin Brookes - Paid Social Media Manager.
- Robin covered Facebook Marketing and specifically how you can see what your competitors are advertising on Facebook.
Kherrin Wade - Strategy Director.
- In Kherrin's workshop she discussed all about data with real-life insights with work she's done for one of our clients, Event Insurance Services.
Tom Crewe - Head of Organic
- Tom's workshop covered SEO and best practices in SEO alongside the not-so-best practice tactics to use in your SEO marketing.
Mark Willis & Matt Freeman - Head of Development & UX/UI Designer.
- Matt and Mark smashed their workshop on website performance and why it’s so important for your website to perform well.
Andy Headington - CEO.
- In Andy's workshop he covered digital. And specifically why websites struggle and if an agency is what you need. He also touched upon what happens during a website launch.
David Berendt & I - Head of Paid Media & Paid Search Marketing Executive.
- In our workshop David and I spoke about in a world of automation, what role does a PPC marketer play.
Alexandra Roebuck - Client Engagement Director
- Alex echoed Olly's mainstage presentation about the importance of creative content in her Hero, Hub, Help content approach
So that was the Attention! summit in a nutshell, from lots of learning to a delicious lunch, unlimited popcorn, pic ‘n’ mix, alcoholic goodies and ice cream!
If you want to find out more about our events check this page out, or get in touch with any of the Adido team members.
Make sure to keep an eye out for our next event!!
