Future of Web Design, London 18/4

I thought I’d add my couple of pennies-worth regarding the FOWD conference. As this is my first blog post I was planning a grand review of literary and referential worth but Dave was first off the blocks and beat me to it, and as if to rub salt in the wound he also spelt my name wrong.

As Dave pointed out in his other blog, the overall quality of speakers made it difficult to pick a favourite but I would briefly like to mention two that have stuck in my mind – partly because of their wildly differing approaches.

If I’m wearing my thinking cap then William Rosen’s presentation, Maximizing Consumer Engagement online, was exactly what I wanted from a digital marketing perspective. He highlighted the importance of an exchange of value between the consumer and the brand and outlined a few
simple ways to give punters a great online experience. Everything he had to say made brilliant sense and was backed up by all manner of flow diagrams and charts and case studies.

Nat Hunter
from Airside followed with analmost polar opposite presentation of a similar topic. Her case studies of cross media interactive campaigns showed an insane level of creativity. I was particularly impressed by the example of Meeghoteph, an ancient alien god that was installed at music festivals and spoke to visitors about whatever subjects they wanted to bring up. It has since generated a web following via Flickr and other sites.

But what’s this got to do with websites I hear you ask? Well, as Nat pointed out, people don’t separate their online and offline lives – they just get on with living. That simple realization is quite enlightening and really opens up possibilities for a “digital” marketing agency.

We should be looking for ways that an online campaign could be made more engaging by integrating offline aspects. Nat was regrettably cut short due to time restrictions but I came away with a few ideas that I hope to be able to implement into KMP’s projects in the future.