Just back from my holiday so time to write up a review of Econsultancy’s Future of Digital Marketing event, which was very good indeed. It happened on 17 June 2009. Looking back at my notes the theme that emerged most strongly throughout the day was ‘back to basics’. When digital marketeers talk of such things they are referring to prioritisation of landing page copy, getting to grips with quickly executing AdWords campaigns, optimising existing traffic and user journeys and so on. It’s all good advice, as we are oh so easily distracted – particularly (as Louise White from Incisive Media pointed out) by twitter. (She was great by the way, and not just because she was the only woman speaker. :)

Beyond the sage advice of keeping things simple and focusing on traditional marketing strategies to stay afloat, there was some futurology in the shape of a presentation on geo-spatial marketing by Nic Ray from Quirk eMarketing. Using Google Earth to raise awareness of good causes and global campaigns is such a great idea and one I’m certainly interested in exploring – and apparently all kinds of folk are at it, from the obvious such as travel destination promoters, to entertainment and film clients, government and ‘real estate’ (I’ve never known why real estate is called that did you? Checked the etymology bit on wikipedia if you are interested)!

The ever entertaining Ian Jindal rounded up the day and also used a future-fied example pertaining to real estate – i.e. Imagine if you could hold up your phone over a house advertised for sale and using the cam and a downloaded app, you get real-time, clickable data layed over the image of the house giving you more details and enabling you to book an appointment or whatever. Pretty cool huh? and this type of stuff is starting to happen – check out Layar. Ian also talked about notions and user trends of ‘doing not viewing’, the possibilities of Attention Profiling Markup Language, brain scanners and hyperdata. You should have been there – it’s hard to sum it all up!

Of course those of us who are more Zen will know it’s important to be in the present, and not always looking to the future, but hey- it’s fun to imagine where technology will take us too. Jonathan McDonald was definitely the most gregarious and hilarious presenter on the day and he reminded all those in digital marketing that from here on in they are ALL in the mobile industry.

No one can predict what the next big thing will be, but we know it will be facilitated by networked collaboration, fat pipes and better, more interactive web and mobile experiences. Maybe some six sense wearable technology too.

In the mean time, it’s back to basics and I’m off to check my landing pages.

You can see the twitter feed here #FODM