Rezonence news

In what is a slight break with tradition, we at Rezonence have decided that a generic email is no longer the right way to share our news with the world!

Given the GDPR, and the sheer quantity of emails that I’m still personally receiving regardless, we wanted to give your inboxes a break — and shift our regular updates to a slightly more personal approach on LinkedIn. Hope you like it!!

NFI Cannes

As the industry piled off to Cannes at the end of June, we ran our NFI Cannes event, for those who hadn’t been f***ing invited! The event was a bottomless afternoon of Rose in Shoreditch, hosted by Dominic Mills, where we were discussing trust, and what we as an industry could do to restore it. We were luck enough to have two stages of guests this year, and the content did not disappoint. 

We had planned to kick off the event with a talk from Ed Vaizey MP, the ex Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. Our event fell on the same day as the parliament vote on the Brexit bill. We did still feel that our event was more important… but Ed unfortunately did not! It was a great shame not to have him, but are extremely grateful to Ed who took the time to record us a welcome message, where he spoke about the importance of a free, well funded press, and its benefits for democracy. 

First stage

Warning: In hindsight I did choose the wrong venue, both from a smell and more importantly lighting perspective for the videos! So please do excuse the darkness, entirely my fault!

So, in the absence of Ed on the first stage, Wayne Blodwell from the Programmatic Advisory kicked things off. He was talking about Programmatic simplicity, and with the expected growth in programmatic from $14.2bn in 2015 to $36.8bn in 2019, presented some of the positive steps being taken to put the trust back into programmatic.  You can see the video here - but be warned, in hindsight I did choose the wrong venue, both from a smell and more importantly lighting perspective for the videos! So please do excuse the darkness, entirely my fault!

He was followed by Denise Turner from Newsworks, who was discussing the flight to quality, and the importance of building brand trust in a quality environment. You can see the video here.

Charlie Crideford of Pepsico International was third up, talking about challenging the status quo across media planning, buying, and measuring. Drawing on her time at Sky as well, she presented a whole host of top tips for achieving holistic planning.  You can see the video here.

Second stage

The second ‘summer’ stage was stationed outside, and was kicked off by Alex Tait interviewing an expert panel comprised of Bek Kennedy from Heineken, Charlie Criddeford from Pepsi and Steve Chester from ISBA, giving their perspective on 'What clients are trying to achieve.’  There was some interesting discussion around the ISBA Manifesto; Improving standards in digital, improving effectiveness and ROI, promoting a high-quality media environment and championing self-regulation. All our panellists agreed that there is no one size fits all agency approach. 

Second on the agenda was an interview by Katy Eckersley (Rezonence) with Sandy Ghuman, Campaign Planning and Delivery Controller at Sky, discussing Data in the World of GDPR. While data has always been seen as an asset, Sandy was adamant that the introduction of the GDPR has not transformed it into a liability (as many may have thought), but has in fact reinforced and increased its value.

Our final debate on stage was a view from the “doers” around Trust in Programmatic. Wayne Blodwell, Founder & CEO at The Programmatic Advisory, mediated Danielle Darko of MediaCom, Lauren Dick of MailOnline, and Rezonence’s own Ibo Karakurt giving their views from the coal face. There was some heated debate, but everyone agreed on the key point; Firstly, communication and managing expectations are key in maintaining trust. Secondly, people play a crucial role in maintaining brand safety. It’s harder to isolate inventory than people realise – a human eye is still needed for that final sense check.

The big finale

The evening was finished off on stage one with a heavyweight punch up between Adam Smith from GroupM & Ian Whittaker from Liberum, debating ‘Is this the death of the Agency?’. With everyone in the audience able to vote live, there was no room for any slip ups. See who won the debate here.

We’d like to extend a huge thank you to all of our speakers for their fascinating input, and to everyone who attended for making the event such a great success.  

There's more...

In other news, as my budding career as a journalist continues to go from strength to strength, here are the next two instalments, originally published on Forbes, but now on our blog incase you missed them:

To stick or to twist? A question not only asked of Blackjack players in Vegas, but start-up founders too.

‘Charity begins at home’. As many brands start using their marketing budgets as a force for good n the world, shouldn't the marketing itself be a force for good too?

We hope you like the new format, and look forward to our next update soon and please do DM me with any feedback.