Last week, I got the chance to hang out at the Future Marketing Summit 2007 in London. The theme was integration and it managed to attract a host of practitioners from a decent variety of agencies – large, small, digital, traditional etc. While it was clear that most agencies haven’t fully cracked integration, there was a consensus view that we are all headed in that direction – always good to hear when you work with an integrated agency.

I won’t go into a blow by blow report of the summit, you can find one of those here.

A couple of things struck me. One was about the relationship of advertising to design. For two disciplines that are so close on one level, on most others they often appear to come from different planets. I’ll post more about this soon, I want to marshal some thoughts first.

The other came from a comment that Russell Davies made. The panel was discussing who was good at integration in action (as opposed to those who simply talk a good game). Crispin, Porter + Bogusky came up as the current poster child of the integrated agency world. Russell made the point that there was no magic formula to their success, that they obviously had a density of talent but that their real skill was that they got on and actually made the ideas real.

This thought was brilliantly illustrated later by Tim Ashton of Antidote (who I felt was the closest of anyone at the event to getting the whole integration thing right and was the one presenter to make me feel downright jealous). He presented a case study around We are what we do and the Change the world for a fiver book. It was a great example of just getting on and doing it. I’m sure the charity-ish nature of the book helped in their ability to beg and borrow material but the attitude of just getting it done that Tim talked about was inspiring. If they needed a shot and couldn’t get it, they took it. Many agencies wouldn’t dream of doing this, they’d want it all polished and perfect. But the result Antidote achieved was certainly good enough.

This move against overly polished work, towards work that’s always work in progress is a massively liberating thought. Yes, it’s still got to look good and has to have a great idea behind it but not be so ‘constructed’ that it feels like spin. Jay Chiat is often quoted as saying “good enough isn’t good enough” but today, maybe it is. If the thinking is right, if we make the right connections with the audience, if we’re authentic, then we can begin to loosen the grip of the cookie cutter brand manual.

I can only see this as a good thing.

Lifehacker points to a handy new site – with yet another ridiculo.us name – popuri.us. Essentially the site aggregates a bunch of sources to give you a picture of how popular your site is. So you get its PageRank, Alexa rank, Technorati links and a bunch more. See the BBC example below:

While this isn’t rocket science, it does bring it all together in one place. One for the bookmarks.

AppleInsider has an article on the wider possibilities of multitouch for Apple beyond the iPhone. While the positioning of this as being a “mega-platform” feels a little like jargonitis, the idea makes perfect sense.

The article is more focused on the effect this could have on Apple’s share price than on customers but the change in possible user experience is surely the big story here.

While OS X is already pretty much a doddle to use, all OS-es are now reasonably similar. And most mice have just about as many buttons and wheels as they can handle. Multitouch offers the chance to have a far more intuitive interface with way better use of screen real estate – running out of room? Just pinch. It also offers a change in mindset where the user is closer to the action, not having to act on the screen through other attached devices.

Whether this will do for PCs what the iPod did for MP3 players remains to be seen but I’d be very surprised if we don’t see a multitouch iMac before too long.

Regardless of where you stand on the iPhone, it was hard to remain unimpressed by the demo of the multitouch screen. Watching Steve Jobs pinching photos smaller and bigger was a real oooo moment. (Although, putting it that way makes it sound a little underwhelming.)

Now, it looks like we might get this technology on a large scale. Jeff Han, one of the brains behind multitouch has created a new company Perceptive Pixel to develop large screen versions of the technology. You can see a pretty mesmerising video here:

You can also see Jeff demonstrating the technology back in February 2006 at TED.

I badly want some of this. It makes our write-on walls at Banner seem pretty lame by comparison. Of course, I’d probably just spend hours re-sorting my virtual desk and pinching things to all different sizes. Fun though.

Source: Presentation Zen

So I spent yesterday at this year’s Institute of Direct Marketing Business-to-Business Conference. I rarely get to conferences. Even the ones I book on always seem to fall on days where ’stuff happens’ and I become another no-show. But yesterday, I actually made it.

And wished I hadn’t.

The only reason I will go to events like these is to learn stuff. I’m not interested in the networking (probably because I’m rubbish at it) and catered food only holds so much appeal. It’s all about new thinking that challenges the mind and expands my understanding.

Apart from the odd mention of blogs and a good overview of search marketing (presented really well by Chris Warwick of Hoover’s) this could have been a conference in 1997 rather than 2007. We were told of the need to understand business customers as people. How marketing and sales really should get on better. And given an insight into how a campaign can progress from “frankly we don’t know what we’re doing” to “for the most part, we do know what we’re doing.”

I then joined the “marketing to corporates” stream that conscientiously avoided any mention whatsoever of how to market to corporates. Soon after, I lost the will to live.

Business-to-business has always been FMCG’s ugly sister. But the challenges and opportunities within B2B/considered purchase are (IMHO) far more interesting than FMCG. The complexity of the sales. The need to really engage with the market over a long period. The chance to partner with customers. All offer massive scope for innovative thinking and fresh approaches.

If what I saw yesterday is representative of where most of the industry is at, we should all be very afraid.