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Marketing Festival 2017

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Matej Kukučka
2017-11-26 Matej Kukučka

This year Marketing Festival took place on 9-10th November in Prague, which replaced Ostrava, where the Marketing Festival was held in the last years. There were nearly 2000 participans, about 1400 of whom were representatives of CZ and SK community, and about 400 were from abroad. Festival consisted of 2 days, the first being on the training program, the next day the conference itself.

I won’t go very deep, there have already been several reports on this topic which I attach at the end of the article. They will lead you in more detail about the conference. My goal is to describe the points that attracted me most.

The first day I attended LinkedIn training. There were  several number of attractive trainings to choose from. Their price wasn’t high, so I decided to try one of them. I chose LinkedIn because I never used it much as an individual and I see it as a potential channel that can be used to talk directly to customers. The training was led by Josef Kadlec, an expert on the topic. After a short presentation of all participants, a lecture on different facts began, which showed the reason why LinkedIn can be the right channel for many of us.

But LinkedIn also has competition, specifically:

Professional networks in some countries: Vladeo, XING, GoldenLine, Zoominfo
Other gobal networks: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, About.me
Other sources: Twitch, Steam, Dribble, Behance

The beginning of training was addressed to LinkedIn introduction and how we can incorporate it into our strategies.

Specifically, we can use it to:

Search (HR, companies, influencers …)
Direct sales / contact
Content Sharing
Personal branding
Company presentation

These points seemed interesting and I felt that the trainer would pass through all of them. In the end, the training was mainly about search, overall HR issues and how to get the most accurate data out of LinkedIn.

Overall, we can reach people at LinkedIn in following ways:

Invitation
Message
InMail
E-mail
Phone
Non-LinkedIn Channel

The training was then focused on how to properly search, whether inside LinkedIn or through search engines. The coach also dealt with various tools, which can improve our work, or different browser extensions. I didn’t find out anything special and most of the things that was mentioned I have on my website about marketing tools.

Overall, the training was not bad, but the slides were a bit messy, the coach did not get through all of them, he only dealt with one topic that did not interest me too much, and the knowledge was mainly for novice marketers. However, the lecture was not too expensive and the coach’s presentation skills were professional. He also brought some interesting tips, so I certainly do not regret his participation.

The conference itself had the following program:

Jindřich Fáborský – Welcome to Marketing Festival 2017

Rand Fishkin – The Invisible Giant that Mucks Up Our Marketing

Kim Goodwin – Right Research, Right Value

Joe Wade – We Must Scare Our Clients

Avinash Kaushik – AI and Machine Learning: Implications on Business, Marketing & Analytics

Bob Hoffman – Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey

Shailin Dhar – Fighting Ad-Fraud: Understanding Monetization of the Internet

Dr. Bradley Vines – Enhancing creative content with neuroscience

Filip Podstavec – Get inside the head of a crawler

Oli Gardner – Data-Driven Design

The moderator was Cyrus Shepard, who is a renowned marketing expert, especially on SEO.

Jindřich Fáborský – Welcome to Marketing Festival 2017

The festival commander himself introduced the program and its essentials. I do not really want to pause here, but I just want to note that whenever I wanted to look for a mistake at the festival itself, I remembered how extremely difficult it is to put together a large number of top-level participants as well as the speakers and how many other, “hidden” work must be done to make sure that no one can complain. I myself am from the same industry and I very much appreciate the hard work they had to spend to bring a conference that was at least as good as previous years. Even small errors in this sphere can be a big problem, especially in the Czech and Slovak community. One word. Respect.

Rand Fishkin – The Invisible Giant that Mucks Up Our Marketing

We had all high expectations from Rand. I’m dealing with SEO most of all traffic sources and I love his Whiteboard Fridays, because they bring me some new ideas all the time. The lecture itself, however, honestly disappointed me. Rand has begun ti unconventionally, by discussing women’s inequality, which is something we all know, but this topic didn’t suit for this kind of conference, at least in my opinion. He then talked about things I have seen from him several times, and it is a fact that his lecture had already been presented this year at other events. Rand is a very good speaker, but this time he was expecting more.

Kim Goodwin – Right Research, Right Value

Kim Goodwin is an UX and user research specialist and her lecture has had some interesting insights. Certainly some have forced to embark on a deeper customer research study and to put more weight on it. In our local community, Jan Kvasnička and Jan Rezáč are doing a great job spreading a word about it, and they are talking about it on their trainings. I recommend their  Strategic Webdesign training from my own experience.

Joe Wade – We Must Scare Our Clients

Joe Wade’s lecture, which focused mainly on the standard advertising that hunt us on TV and radio, was somehow biased to speaker’s favorite channel. He has shown some interesting examples, but overall, I’m digital guy, therefore I did not really appreciate the idea the speaker brought.

Avinash Kaushik – AI and Machine Learning: Implications on Business, Marketing & Analytics

Avinash’s presentation was one of the best we could see at this year’s Marketing Festival. His lecture on AI was eye-catching, intimate and full of interesting facts, and also funny. Although it is the theme of the future, we will be definitely working with it in next years.

Bob Hoffman – Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey

Bob Hoffman is considered to be an opponent of all ad formats and “marketing realist” more than typical marketing enthusiast. His lecture was very interesting and certainly brought to a large number of participants so-called ” “Aha” moment. His ad targeting, research of the most adorable ads, or bad examples from the world of advertising were an interesting addition to other more standard topics of other speakers.

Shailin Dhar – Fighting Ad-Fraud: Understanding Monetization of the Internet

Shailin, along with his colleague, talked about the deceptive advertising and all the various unfair practices that are increasingly appearing in our lands. Although this lecture was a bit mysterious for a large number of participants, I personally worked in the cyber-security industry and I know how dangerous the various types of phishing, ransomware, ddos ​​attacks or bots are, which can ruin an unsecured business. Watch out, this problem is bigger that we might think.

Dr. Bradley Vines – Enhancing creative content with neuroscience

If some, including me, were expecting a boring theoretical lecture full of research and statistics, they were mistaken. Bradley talked about the “Puppy Monkey Baby” ad, and how it affects the body of the person who saw the ad. Although Eye Tracking and advanced ad testing are mainly for big companies, I enjoyed the lecture and I’m looking forward to it when it’s available for larger audience, including myself.

Filip Podstavec – Get inside the head of a crawler

Filip is the founder of Marketing Miner and SEO and Link Building specialists. His lecture dealt with a totally new concept that is not addressed in our region, namely Crawl Budget. Personally, I started to deal with log analysis and bot access lately, so I highly appreciated the lecture. Although Filip is not a natural speaker, but rather a specialist himself, who will solve every problem, his lecture was full of useful tips and certainly showed that he didn’t underestimate his preparation. It was not for everyone, but every team should start to put time in crawl budget.

Oli Gardner – Data-Driven Design

Oli Gardner from Unbounce has closed a conference with topic data-driven design. Even though I am not a huge fan of Unbouce myself and I have replaced it with a different solution at two clients so far, it did not let me reject on an interesting lecture on design by him. Oli talks fairly often, which was also reflected in his great speech. You can read similar lecture on the following link.

Overall, I consider the overall conference to be very positive and I look forward to attending it in the future.

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Matej Kukučka
Author Matej Kukučka
Matej Kukučka is an internet entrepreneur and marketing specialist who works as a CMO & Co-Founder in the startup called StreamBee. He is the founder of the Marketing Player portal.
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