I’ve just returned from Think Visibility 5, a cracking conference on Search and Affiliate Marketing. What makes this conference so much different to the other events in our sector’s calendar is not just its quality of speakers, but also their willingness to share so openly their learnings, techniques, hints and tips in an extremely friendly and approachable way – the fact that it’s also held on a Saturday also illustrates how special this event is and the following it has. A small conference held in Leeds, organised by the wonderfully entertaining and industry legend Dom Hodgeson, it is very possibly one of the best.
With this level of reputation, I was therefore hugely delighted to be invited to speak at the event and willingly obliged. Given it was a Saturday conference, I decided to go for a mix of information and fun, hosting the session – Performance Marketing, it’s a Piece of Cake.
Taking the audience through my personal career journey, spotlighting how the Affiliate sector has evolved (including a few toe-curling reminders of some of the industry’s least glamorous moments!), I talked about how the industry has truly grown up and professionally matured. So much so, that our Performance-model ethos has now led us to operate in a much wider environment, one of cross digital Performance Marketing. Illustrating the key ingredients for successful Performance Marketing campaigns, I explained how to ‘mix’ the perfect elements of the right Merchant, Landing Pages, SEO and PPC before showing the icing on the cake of blending Search with Social to deliver true Performance insight and delivery.
Taking to the stage post-lunch, I decided to bring a little Saturday Kitchen to the proceedings, bringing the mix of ingredients analogy alive and physically making a cake on stage! I must say, I did wonder what had possessed me to do such a thing as I took to the stage, but thanks to a very willing assistant in Ricki Jones, I think I just about pulled it off!
Elsewhere, the programme was packed with some impressive speakers. There were some excellent presentations including Paddy Moogan, providing some hints and tips for link-building, Paul Smith and his one-man twitter world trip and Annabel Hodges, providing insights into reporting and communication.
Add to all of this, we also had a few surprises in the form of sweets named after all of the speakers , a supersized scalextric track and a thoroughly entertaining lunchtime quiz; Think Visibility really did have the mix of excellent content and fun. Can’t wait for 2012.
