Central Perk: brightonSEO: Live Blog

vineri, 14 septembrie 2012

brightonSEO: Live Blog

Posted: 14 Sep 2012 01:50 AM PDT

Live from Brighton, and we’re really looking forward to hearing their insights and thoughts; all 19 of them! Doors opened at 9:00am and the first speaker is scheduled to speak at 10:00 am. Stay tuned.

We don’t have fancy auto-refreshes so you’ll need to refresh your browser to see the updates :-)

10:01 am: The first speaker is on stage, Dave Trott – Executive Creative Director at CSTTG will be talking about “Predatory Thinking”. Sounds intriguing. Must be similar to “Guerilla Marketing”. Dave’s using an analogy of pure maths and applied math with pure creativity and applied creativity.

Pure = theory, like the art you see in galleries, or poetry. Applied = practical, like advertising

Dave suggests that, when it comes to creativity, we follow the essential Bauhaus principle – form follows function.

In other words, everything we do needs to have a reason and try to solve a problem.

Practical creativity is to ensure what we do is remembered. Everything we do sits, naturally, within the context of our industry. What you need to do is distinguish yourself and what you’re doing. Don’t blend into the background; you need to stand out.

Predatory thinking is about getting ahead.

Dave talked about three stages of advertising:

Impact
Communication and
Persuasion.

Most marketers focus far more on Persuasion than on anything else. However, it would be far more useful for them to focus on Impact. This is because most advertising, 90% in fact, isn’t remembered at all. It fails at the Impact stage.

The key point here is that it doesn’t matter how persuasive you are if no-one remembers what you do.

The problem is that people are over-exposed to advertising. This means that the have very selective perception when it comes to what they see.

In fact, we are very binary. Ideas either stand out to us or they don’t. And if they don’t stand out then we simply forget about them.

So, in order to have Impact, you have to stand out. You have to be different in order to be remembered and so have any chance of success.

People are either opinion formers or opinion followers. There are, of course, far more opinion followers than opinion formers. You want to really engage with the opinion formers rather than opinion followers (particularly if you can't throw lots of money at your advertising and simply buy numbers) because they will disseminate the information and it will travel downwards to everyone else. This doesn’t happen if you’re only attracting opinion followers.

To get opinion formers interested you have to stand out and be different. That's what they’re looking for.

Dave’s now talking about how to solve problems you can’t solve.

He’s used several examples to show how to go about it. Here’s one:

People used to have a lot of chip pan fires. No matter how much information people saw about the dangers of leaving chip pans unattended and how bad chip pan fires were, it didn’t change their behaviour.

They looked at the effect this was having, and it was causing a huge number of fire brigade call-outs. So they changed the problem. They decided to try to minimise the number of fire brigade call-outs.

So they started a campaign to teach people how to put out chip pan fires. This resulted in a drop in chip pan fires of 40%.

What predatory thinking is about it changing problems you can’t solve into ones you can.

You’ve got to go upstream and work on a problem higher up.

It’s all about getting ahead!

Another great example is the iPod. When Steve Jobs created it, he’d invented what was, at the time, the best way to listen to music on the go. And, it was picked up by the coolest people.

However, the problem was that everyone who had one walked round with it in their pocket, so no-one knew they had it.

So Steve thought outside the box. He went upstream and thought “How can we make everyone who has an iPod noticeable?”

And what did he think up? Headphones. Everyone has to wear headphones and at the time everyone had identical, black ones.

So he made iPod headphones white.

Immediately, everyone who had an iPod became a walking advert for the product. Genius!

DO YOU SPEAK BRAND? Antony Mayfield

SEOs like to be diva's where there's always talk about when search is going to be dead.

There are adversarial dialogues between the different disciplines such as social vs SEO or Paid search vs. SEO etc. But people miss the opportunity of bringing all these elements together in order to create real value and real impact.

The most powerful thing about search is that it's a database of insight in to consumer's intent.

Lucky seven. Anthony explained how a woman used to be really fed up of searching for things like holidays or furniture and always getting the same, bland shops and results. So what she started doing was, when she'd done a search, go to page seven of the results and start looking there. She'd bypass all the optimised results and start with more random offbeat ones.

Apologies for the infrequent updates folks. The wifi at the dome is pretty horrendous. I’m actually stood outside updating this post via 3G at the minute. It’s the first coffee break. So we’ll probably freshen up a bit and come back for more updates.