The Yorkshire Mafia Takes Digital in Hand

Before you ask, the Yorkshire Mafia has not been guilty of any mob hits in the last ten years. However, it has been a key mover in getting local businesses to compete on a global scale. This year’s Buy Yorkshire 2018 was no exception, and saw some huge names in digital marketing, advertising, journalism, civil service and thought leadership give their insights on how we will be communicating corporate and non-profit messages in the near future. Here is our round-up for you, because we like to share…

Digital Trends 2018

James Whatley, Planning Partner at Ogilvy, has graded his own homework with past predictions, awarding himself and ex-partner Marshall Manson a B + on the 2017 emerging trends report. They were correct about increased use of chatbots, an awareness of the ethical risks of AI, continuing growth of video and problems with Facebook’s reliability on metrics, but wrong that Twitter would have to retrench. This year Ogilvy is forecasting four trends, which James shared at the conference:

1. Augmented Reality will become more and more of a feature in brand communications
2. We will type less and talk more as image and voice recognition software improves and smart assistants take off
3. Influencers will continue to be huge for brand marketing
4. Amazon is going to be huge as ad sales take off across Prime, Alexa, Kindle and the shopping portal

For us at Techbuyer, what is most interesting about all this is the increasing and evolving use of data. Data centres are the engines that power the changing face of industry and commerce. Keeping costs low during upgrades and modification will be even more important as systems change.

…and the importance of the real

Senior sports and business journalists from the Guardian, Times, Telegraph and the Yorkshire Post discussed fake news, whilst Chris Hamilton talked about strong, authoritative civil service public engagement in his role as Head of Digital Communications at Downing Street. The running theme throughout both seminars was the need for real content in a tech-focused world. It was a message picked up amongst stall holders too; in amongst the SEO specialists and creative advice for ad campaigns, the wheels of fortune, food samples, free coffee and conversation grabbed a lot of attention. As suppliers of hardware, with a passion for detail, it was great to see that real life is not forgotten.

Partnerships are key

Another theme that came up repeatedly was the importance of partnerships when it comes to getting an organisation’s name out and raising their profile. It is good for product development too, as we found out when talking to the universities looking to cooperate with business on research initiatives and training programmes for their students. We are always looking for ways to improve our products and services and explore innovative ideas, so will be exploring some of the options they laid out for collaboration and grants.

Attention spans are longer than we think

In an age where technology evolves fast and stimuli multiply, we are increasingly buying into the story that our attention spans are now shorter than those of goldfish. Not so says Jason A. Miller, Global Content Marketing Leader at LinkedIn. His end of the day talk demonstrated that the long form article is making a comeback and that users are hungry for content of over 2000 words or more, as long as it has something interesting to say. As a result, we will try our best to deliver at Techbuyer with more researched posts, industry topics and research. Watch this space!