I attended the 2014 CIM Digital Summit last week in London, hosted at Bloomberg's offices. The conference welcomed a diverse set of speakers including Andrew Grill from IBM, David Pemsel from the Guardian and Dara Nasr from Twitter UK (who had stopped in just long enough to do his presentation before setting off on a London to Paris bike ride!)
As with many of these conferences, a large emphasis was placed on looking towards the future and determining what is next for this ever-changing and fast-paced world that is digital.
The closing session was an audience-led panel debate, providing the attendees the opportunity to choose the direction that the conversation went.
One of the questions that I found most interesting was to do with what the panelists considered to be digital marketing's greatest challenges ahead.
I could certainly relate to Andrew Grill of IBM's response, where he suggested that "lazy marketers" posed the biggest obstacle in the future. He provided an example of an unnamed UK broadband supplier that continues to blanket send letters to various districts (whether the recipients are customers or not) addressed "Dear Householder". After complaining about this, he was informed that not enough people had criticised this practice to warrant them addressing the situation... I don't think I am the only one who knows exactly who Andrew is referring to. In fact I raised this same grievance with them a number of years ago, but they failed to respond at all in my case.
The fact is, lazy marketing is irritating and it's everywhere. How many times have I received an email asking me to register for an event or webinar and even after doing so, I am sent reminder emails asking me to register for that very same event. It would not require much effort on the marketer's part to filter out those that have already registered, they would probably reduce their unsubscribe rate and certainly it would save the recipient much frustration.
Other responses to the panel question included audiences' reduced attention spans, mobile marketing challenges and big data. The latter is of course something we are hearing a lot about these days. During his presentation, Daniel Rowles, Course Director at CIM demonstrated over a 10 second period, how many hours of video footage were added to YouTube.
19 hours in case you were wondering, which equates to almost 19 years of content every day.
Naturally it's daunting wondering how on earth you are going to sift through all that content to pull out the information that matters most. Some sound advice was offered by Stewart Easterbrook of Starcom MediaBest Group on how to deal with this though.
Just worry about small data - decide on what details are important to you and focus on the best ways to gather and analyze that information.
And of course it's true. If you obsess too much over the noise, you won't get anything done. There is simply too much going on out there and you can't possibly be expected to process all of that information.
The conversation left me wondering what my biggest concern was about the future. Eventually I decided that it was probably just the sheer speed at which everything is moving. Every single day there are new developments that will shape the digital landscape and determine the path we take.
All the same though, this is part of the fun for me and certainly makes for a very dynamic and exciting career ahead. As Ash Roots from Direct Line Group rightly stated: we may think that things are moving fast now, but remember, this is the slowest that things will ever be for the rest of our lives...
So I guess we should just sit back and enjoy the ride.
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