February 6, 2012
The recent Dx3 Conference and digital marketing show here in Toronto turned out to be very successful from some accounts, and we thought we might weigh in ourselves.
First off there was a very funny live version of the CBC Debaters to kick off the two day event, which generated lots of real belly laughs at 8:45 in the morning. Not an easy thing to pull off!
Our selected sessions began next, with Peter Aceto, the CEO of ING Direct Canada. He spoke thoughtfully about what it means to be a “Social CEO” and what that means on a day to day basis. Some members of his team were in the room as well, and it was refreshing to hear his candid account of how social media has changed the way ING Direct handles some aspects of customer service across the organization. You can follow Peter on Twitter here.
Next up was Kunal Gupta, the CEO of Polar Mobile in Toronto. They claim to have launched over 1200 apps in the companies history and he certainly didn’t waste any time in answering the packed rooms eager questions.
“What is the average life span of an app?”, asked one member of the audience. After a bit of a qualifier most of the room seemed quite surprised by the answer, which was six months. You could practically hear the ROI calculations going on…
Dave Fleet of PR firm Edelman was up in the afternoon sessions, talking about engaging bloggers and other influencers in marketing campaigns. He is an active blogger himself and had a lot of common sense advice for brand managers and marketers in terms of engaging with earned media creators. You can follow him on Twitter here.
On day two of the conference Ed Lee from DDB Canada spoke for an hour about “Maximizing Twitter” to a packed room. There was lots of give and take in this session, with Ed handling a spectrum of questions from the ridiculous to the sublime. With the impact and use of Twitter still very much of a fluid thing, he helped lay out some good guidelines for brand managers and marketers to follow when defining their Twitter strategies.
One of the richest sessions was “Content Marketing and the Age of Creating Value” by Raymond Girard and Arjun Basu from Spafax Interactive. They are the team behind Air Canada’s En Route magazine and have a global client list and more than 25 years in the content marketing business. Their presentation was littered with examples of exceptional branded content and even more importantly, the details of how and why brands need to approach this subject. When done wrong it can do serious damage to a brand. When done very well…it can make a brand sing with relevance.
Next’s years Dx3 Canada has been scheduled for March 6-7th here at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. If you are involved with marketing a brand, either on the client side or the agency side…it is a conference worth checking out. You can find out more here.