haysmacintyre sponsor greyhairworks! Autumn Showcase

Members of our Creative, Media and Technology team were in attendance last night (27 November). Joined by Greyhairworks! Solution Partners, clients and friends, our team heard from a variety of experienced speakers on the latest marketing innovative solutions, including Paul Rushforth, Director of Advanced Technology at NBCUniversal, Pete Northing, former Head of Commercial Partnerships at Red Bull and Jesper Wiegandt, former Customer & Channel Marketing Global Lead at P&G, amongst others.

Sophie Knight shares some of her key takeaways from the evening:

1. Using innovative and/or advanced technology to create more personalised experiences for consumers creates a greater impact.
2. Technology is helping companies understand the true ROI and KPIs behind digital advertising campaigns. Using big data analysis to link multiple advertising streams is becoming prevalent in the industry and helps businesses understand their customers’ journeys before, during and after a sale.
3. Make the most of your current customers and try to turn your customers into your brand advocates. These are the people who already buy/like your products therefore using them to your advantage and using them to spread a company/product through word of mouth is far more powerful than advertising.
4. There are some awesome tools out there which allow companies to use previously defunct data to drive sales and determine when customers will buy something.
5.  ‘Innovation’ – maybe the most key term used throughout the event – is everywhere and needs to be encouraged otherwise you as a business will stagnate. Creating the culture where this is embraced should be encouraged from the top so that is feeds down to all. Innovation cannot be seen as a tick box excuse but must be viewed as a culture is fundamental.

It’s important that businesses aren’t innovating in a silo. Where innovation works well is when the implementation of innovative solutions quickly transitions from ideas to reality. The key is not to try to solve the issue yourself, but to be open to influences from other departments and outside of the business.