A lot of business was done. A lot of fun was had. Acronym’s mini Asia tour as sponsors of ClickZ Live took in Hong Kong, Bangkok and finished in Singapore. And what a convenient place to have the final Asia event, as Singapore is Acronym’s second home. It also provided a great opportunity for me to sit down with David Shen, who runs our Asia business, and discuss the various subtleties and differences of search marketing in Asia compared to the US market.
As for the final conference in the series, it was a fabulous turnout of leading brands and agencies from the region. One standout session was presented by Jason Oke, Regional Managing Director, Red Fuse Communications / WPP Team Colgate-Palmolive. “At least you’re not toothpaste” is a sort of standing joke within WPP, as Jason explained. And then he went on to explain that they had made an amazing discovery: In social media, toothpaste is actually a popular subject.
It’s a common thing to imagine that ordinary consumer packaged goods (CPG), such as toothpaste and shampoo, are hardly likely to stand out in social media terms in the same way as luxury goods, rock stars and sports stars might. And yet, as Oke went on to say, when they did a social media audit to listen and find out if toothpaste and shampoo were getting attention, there was a whole lot of activity going on. In particular, the number of images with a “Colgate smile” tag.
I was blown away when he also casually announced that Colgate is actually the #1 brand in the universe, beating even Coca Cola. Which probably explains why WPP tapped into ALL of its divisions and resources to form Red Fuse Communications, an agency dedicated specifically to this one client, Colgate/Palmolive.
Fellow Geordie (you’ll have to Google that 🙂 Chris reed gave an excellent presentation, too. He explained how to make your company’s LinkedIn page stand out from the rest. He provided some excellent examples of companies getting it right. As well, of course, as those making a complete ass-end of it. I wondered what he was insinuating when he asked me if I’d seen Acronym’s LinkedIn page recently… Moving on…
I presented my final keynote session in the series, “Left To Our Own Devices: A State Of Digital Address”. It was kind of a walk through the various stages of digital, mainly from a search perspective. Now, we’re constantly connected to multiple devices: phones, tablets, game consoles, connected TVs, and more.
As the Internet continues to grow exponentially and wearables become more commonplace, people are becoming even more connected to things that are connected to other things. And they randomly speak commands and queries into objects, large and small. I finished with a few thoughts on where it’s all going next.
I’ll be making the presentation available to download in our next edition.
Client, colleague and long-time friend Crispin Sheridan dazzled the audience (as usual) with a fabulous insight into multi-channel attribution modeling.
So many other great presentations, covering everything from search to social, display, email and analytics. Definitely a great finisher to this year’s live events for Acronym.
And we did have a lot of fun at all three events with our “Summer Selfie” competition, which we were able to hold all the way from August to December as the weather was summer-like in each country at each event. It was simple way to win a bottle of bubbly (five winners at each event). All you had to do was don a pair of Acronym’s very cool, orange colored shades and take a selfie and Tweet it.
And the winners are…
Thanks to the Acronym team in New York and Singapore for working so well together and making these events so much fun and so successful. Looking forward to more of the same in 2015!
