I'm sitting at the conference now. Listening and writing my deck. Robert Heath, Caroline Whitehill and Ali Goode all very good so far. Too good for me to summarise on the run now. I need to write something bigger and longer. But I think two themes are gelling in my head:
1. Theoreticians are starting to supply the science/art which supports what interesting practitioners have been doing for a while. Which is probably how these things have always worked.
2. Many of the web 2.0 / marketing 2.0 / brand 2.0 people are just talking about tactics. They're talking about better ways of doing the old things. There's not a lot of new thinking about memory, psychology, all that. The people who are starting to question all the AIDA, USP, blah blah models are often people from an old Big Ads background. Because they've spent 50 years discovering that the old models for human relationships with brands are wrong.
Anyway, more of that later.
However, I do have time to lament the room. Why are they always like this?
I was talking to the organisers, it's not their fault (and the whole thing has been flawless so far). It's what the hotels build. If you're in Central London and you've got more than about 100 people then this kind of thing seems to your only option. Is there a new generation of hotels/conference facilities being built? I hope so.
In order to create the future you have to try to ignore the past even forgetting it sometimes. Web 2.0 is an attitude that can be applied to anything....A bit like pasta sauce
Knew I should have had lunch.
Posted by: Richard | July 05, 2006 at 01:37 PM