“You can’t persuade me [with advertising] unless you have impact to get on my radar and communicate it to me… Everyone assumes the ad will be noticed just because it’s done. That’s why 89% fails. We spend all our time on persuasive.”

- Dave Trott, executive creative director and author

 

“Marketing has become like Tinder; in one second you decide to engage with that content or swipe it away, and that’s what brands have to get used to.”

- Huib Van Bockel, former UK marketing director, Red Bull

 

“It’s not in an advertiser’s DNA to be engrained in the technology. If I had a penny for every time someone told me that they had the best technology then my bank account would be very different. The reality is we don’t know [about programmatic] but you have an excellent tool. You don’t need to know what the best technology is because you have the ability to test it all and work out what works best for the business.”

- Amaya Garbayo, associate director insights and planning, Kellogg

 

“I hold advertising up to be ridiculed, like lots of other aspects of life… There are lots of ways in which the digital world does things that you wouldn’t accept face-to-face. It’s a great example of doing things just because you can. You would not accept that in the real world. It’s not f*cking OK.”

- Dave Gorman, comedian

 

“I think often brands think they are better serviced by being a little bit opaque about their relationship with content. They want the content to say good things about them but not sound like they paid for them things to be said. The brand is much better saying ‘here is some great content, we paid for it’. This way they are being transparent about it.”

- David Lerman, co-founder and CTO, Say Media

 

"The king is dead, and in this instance, I believe the king is advertising. Creativity is alive and more invigorated than ever, but advertising as we know it is dead. What you see now is the final twitches of a dinosaur struggling to understand its own doom. The old approach to advertising, which has a slight egocentric arrogant point of view about how we push messages to consumers, is outdated and outmoded."

- Ben Sutherland, head of performance, Vizeum

 

“When social is used in ways where you listen to fans and give them a voice then it allows them to do the talking for you. Geoff Cotterrell, our CMO, likens our social spaces to a cocktail party in that we as a brand are just a welcome guest. If you follow that analogy through, we started listening to what the other guests at the party we’re saying and it quickly became apparent what we needed to offer them. They were already using social as a playground but what they didn’t have was a community to share ideas and find like-minded souls and inspire each other.”

- Chris Marsh, social media manager, Converse

 

“The big famous brands that we try to create are dependent on reaching a lot of people with relevant messages. And digital channels are the way to do that… It’s an interesting conundrum; it is possible to buy in specialists but in a way that can dumb down the rest of the organisation. We made the choice to really raise the floor and upskill everybody in digital capabilities. It’s a big change for us.”

- John Goldstone, vice-president of brand building, foods and refreshment, Unilever

 

Of course we could go on all day, but we just don’t have the time…