An Oasis

E-marketing Conference 2003

I attended a conferece today entitled eMarketing 2003 which was a bit odd. Odd because I haven't been to one of these things for a while and I forgot how tedious some of it all is.

There were a couple of excellent speakers; Nick Fiddes of Scotweb totally knew his stuff and presented as clear a plan as any small business could hope for in tackling the 'net as a marketing communications tool. Nick is probably one of maybe 5 or 6 people in the Scottish Web Dev community who actually understand what it is about and part of his genius is being able to persuade the public sector gravy train type folk that they should listen to him. And listen to Nick they should. Laura Gordon of Boyds Solicitors was good, if a bit dry, on Data Protection, Privacy etc.

Key messages of the day were

• Spam is Bad but it's useful for marketers!
• We market to people but people don't necessarily want to know
• and whatever you do don't trust the opinion of just anyone who manages to get a speaking gig at one of these events.

I seemed to keep sneaking out for a cigarette not because I needed one but just because it was an excuse to get away from ill-informed, committee minded, bull**** laden presentations.

Sometimes I find it hard to reconcile the political aspiration for Scottish economic development with the myriad of Scottish Enterprise hobby horses. I think they could be spending our money significantly more usefully...

Lunch was poor but I suppose they must've been working to a budget of some sort. All in all it was an OK event. If I didn't have a free ticket then I would certainly have grudged the money.

Posted by Paul at September 19, 2003 03:08 AM |