And that’s a wrap! Digital Marketing Futures is, sadly, over for another year. But it’s been an absolute blast, with very nearly 1000 of you registering to attend our seminars about the future of the marketing industry.
Of course, it was fantastic to see a record-breaking turnout for our first events since our rebrand. But let’s not get too emotional. Below, we’ve summarised each seminar and included the recording for you to watch on-demand.
If you’re just after the recordings and aren’t fussed about the summaries below, here you go:
Our own Jon Greenhalgh (Managing Director) kicked off this year’s series with his view on the factors that will influence the future of advertising in the next five years.
According to Jon, it’s our job as an agency to be able to differentiate between the trends that will have an impact further down the road and those that won’t. And then to invest in understanding them to better support our clients.
In the next five years, Jon expects those trends and topics to encompass Marketing Clouds, Artificial Intelligence, Programmatic, Context, Consolidation of Technology, Working with the Right People and the Decline of TV.
Continuing the discussion, Google’s Vanda Pickup sought to assess the enduring impact 2020’s global pandemic is already having on the advertising industry in a number of areas:
A Digital-First World
Media Consumption
Brand Expectations
Cross-Border Consumers
Financial Volatility
In closing, Vanda argued that if brands are to make the most of 2021 they will need to embrace agility and make data analytics part of business, and provide customers with a more personal and seamless experience.
Microsoft Advertising x DMF
In a similar vein to what Jon covered in the Google seminar, Adapt Media Operations Director, Mike Sharp, took a closer look at the post-pandemic trends he thinks will come to define marketing over the next few years.
In no particular order, and giving statistics to back up each claim, Mike made a case for the importance of video marketing, visual search, voice search, artificial intelligence, conversational marketing, extended reality and neuromarketing in the future of our industry.
Returning to one of our events for the second time, Microsoft Advertising’s EMEA Product Marketing Lead, James Murray, took attendees on a journey through how they can future proof their marketing by creating meaningful connections.
It is the job of marketers, James contends, to create authenticity in their advertising, and that to avoid becoming generic there are three steps brands must take:
Address a real human problem
Automate to free creativity
Tell a compelling story
Conductor x DMF
Kicking off the final Digital Marketing Futures seminar for 2021, Adapt Senior Director Digital Innovation, Gurdeep Gola, offered his thoughts on what the SEO landscape will look like post-Covid.
Exploring industry data, Gurdeep showed that businesses are expecting the same or better performance from marketers, despite a general reduction in budgets. As a result, SEO is well-positioned to achieve increased importance in a post-Covid world.
According to Gurdeep, to adapt to the increase in consumer demand driven by Covid, businesses need to understand their SEO data and how search demand is changing, aligning expectations of success, and reprioritising marketing effort based on shifts in demand.
Rounding out this year’s DMF talks, Conductor SEO Insights Strategist, Claudia Higgins, sought to explore what the future of SEO look like and how businesses can put it into practice.
Fundamentally, Claudia argued that SEO needs to be given a more central, holistic role in marketing so you can minimise SEO risk and capitalise on SEO opportunity within the context of the wider business.
Focusing on the stages of SEO maturity, Claudia set out her view of what a bigger role for SEO look like and provided a structured strategy that businesses can use to get comfortable with SEO data, start influencing internal change, create effective SEO processes and prove the value of giving SEO a bigger role within business.
