Advertising Week 2015 saw London as the host and centre of the European advertising world in April for a week of key speakers and seminars.  If like us, you couldn’t make it, working hard in advertising in the creative Cotswolds, you might need a summary of the highlights. Luckily, Marketing Week has done the hard work for us and brings together the top advice offered from speakers representing companies such as Monster, Sky Media, BBC Communications and Unilever.

Measure for Measure

Aim to quantify your marketing efforts wherever you can. This puts you on an even footing with other parts of the business with recognised data, or honest assumptions when data isn’t available.

The long game rather than easy wins

Don’t fall into the trap of just doing short easy-to-measure campaigns at the expense of longer term strategy. According to Andrew Warner, vice-president of marketing at Monster, marketers should ‘focus more on traditional forms of media that could deliver longer-term benefits… Marketers today go for things that show a quick return instead of thinking about the bigger overall business agenda, building a case and arguing it.”

The real you

Looking at creating effective content, John Lewis’s marketing director Craig Inglis urged  marketers and advertising account managers to  “be authentic”, look for big ideas and don’t rely on KPIs. Don’t get too caught in the zeitgeist and the chase for content marketing.  Inglis said, ‘It’s just marketing. Don’t… overplay it. You have to engage customers in the right way.”

Marketing – the communicators

Inn your marketing role, you need to translate from the customer need into language understood by the business. As explained by Chris Duncan, CMO of The Times and The Sun publisher News UK: “Marketing plays a hugely important role, particularly in our organisation, in terms of translating what customers are seeing into the language of whichever division you are trying to explain that to.” For the full analysis of this premier advertising industry event, visit the news page from Marketing Week magazine.