A Christmassy Marketing Day in Southbank!

Hi guys, sorry it's been so long! I can't believe I haven't blogged in an entire month. Will try and keep content consistent from now on!

I've been super busy recently and I can't wait to tell you all the stuff I've been up to!

Starting with last week, I went up to London to attend the 2nd IBM Marketing Placement day in London, I blogged about the first one earlier this year!

The event was held in the Client Centre at IBM's Southbank, London office. This is usually where we host clients and host events and meetings with them. It's a really nice office and much nicer than the Portsmouth one- so it's nice to get out of there, even if it is just for a day ;-)

 

I like it when all the Marketing Placement students get together as we do  fairly often, I've made some good friends from the IBM locations all over the country! The day was mostly focused on IBM's brand and how marketing and communications strategies can positively affect this.

Firstly, we met Alison Orsi who is Head of Marketing, Communication and Citizenship for IBM UK & Ireland- this means she is my bosses, bosses, boss! It was really exciting to hear how she had got to the position in which she is in now and how she never even planned to work in Marketing to begin with! She told us about an IBM advertising campaign in the 90's featuring the pink panter and Johnathan Ross.....?? Not really fitting with the IBM brand we know now!

Softening the corporate image may have been an objective then- but now IBM's Marketing is a lot more targeted and they are much more considerate and thoughtful when making marketing decisions. She focused her presentation on social, valued content creation, SEO and mobile marketing. An interesting thought from the day was the fact that the strategy seems to be shifting from paid-owned-earned towards owned-earned-paid.

Secondly, we had Tony Chapman-Dawe from Strand Communication deliver a presentation on how to write better Marketing text. I found this particularly interesting because of my interest in Journalism- it kind of reminded me of being back in an English lesson!!

He spoke about advertisers being able to grip people in 9 words and how difficult this can be in getting a message across, but also that this is a scope for immense creativity. He presented us with examples from The Economist:

This spark some thought as he noted that brands need to think carefully about the language they use and also what content is actually relevant and of some value to the target audience. He also taught us about the structure of powerpoints and how to create useful and eye catching language. His main theory was that any marketing message should contain Structure, Facts, Examples and Brevity. A great lesson which I will be enforcing in the future! It makes you think about the way that brands craft tweets, in tweets you only have 140 characters to get your message across- therefore they have to be snappy, relevant and concise.

Then, we had Bill Jinks, who project managed IBM's presence at Wimbledon for the last few years. He came to speak to us about the work he had done and how we might like to get involved in working there next year with IBM. The stuff we do at Wimbledon is awesome and far too much to narrow down into one blog post- so check out the website if you would like to know more here.

Then we had a brand quality workshop from 2 members of Marketing who work on the graduate scheme. They spoke to us about the IBM Brand and how it is represented in terms of looking, sounding, thinking and performing like IBM. We also got chance to have a look and dissect IBM's current brand strategy.

We then had an IBM speaker; Mark Devlin spoke to us about IBM's history and the way the IBM brand has been affected and shaped over time. An interesting concept he mentioned was that IBM has never had a figure head like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to represent it's brand image, instead of having this one person to look to, IBM is represented by it's employees who have their own name aka IBMers!

Overall it was a great day with some great people- afterwards we got to check out the Southbank Christmas Markets and then we were treated to a Chinese in Leicester Square!!

IBM Business Connect 2013

Hello there! So this week I was lucky enough to get the chance to attend one of IBM's biggest conferences in our events calendar- Business Connect is an all-day event and is held at various locations across the globe! The conference focuses on technology and innovation in IBM's areas of expertise: social, mobile, cloud, analytics, big data etc. The event was held at Twickenham Stadium and due to IBM's partnership with Rugby Football Union, the entire event was rugby themed. As Registrations started at 7:30- I had a very early start and decided to stay with my friend in London- this was my view of Canary Wharf at 5:30am

 

Very early start indeed!

I arrived at Twickenham Stadium and I was interested to see how the entire conference area had been transformed into an IBM event by the use of fantastic branding- the rooms looked great!

 

I was quite lucky to be able to watch the speeches as I was working inside the main auditorium, I was able to meet David Stokes- CEO of IBM UK which was such a great experience! Then I listened to his speech about the future of technology- he said that 25% of future marketing jobs will have the need for a background in technology- and he predicted that the implementation of Cloud will produce a huge amount of jobs in the next few years- something worth thinking about taking an interest in!!

 

David Stokes on stage 

Throughout the day there were lots of smaller debates and workshops for the deligates, business partners and IBMers to attend. I was mainly working behind the scenes. I had a great chance to see how such a large scale event is run- and ultimately how well IBM present themselves at their own events and how great the feedback from attendees is!

I also got a sneaky chance to sit in IBM's corporate hospitality box at Twickenham Stadium and have a look at the stadium!

 Here's a selfie of me in the stadium!!!

After a very long, but interesting and rewarding day, I got to hear a speech by Ben Kay, former Rugby World Cup Champion.

Here's Ben Kay on stage

He spoke about Leadership, Motivation, Determination, Teamwork and Discipline and how these strengths helped his team win the world cup. He also spoke about how these strengths can be applied to Business.

It was a great day and I was very lucky to be able to attend!

Steph