Having attended Adtech yesterday for the first time I thought I should write a blog on my thoughts regarding how it went and who impressed me the most.

Having looked around the stalls for some time it was clear the agencies that had spent the most money making their stands snazzy got the most interest from customers. However in contrast to this some of the smaller stands that included games and competition got equal amounts of attention thanks to their innovative approaches. For example a company called Gravytrain, got a considerable amount of interest due to a racing game and lap time competition. Quite what this had to do with their brand I wasn't sure, but customers who visited their stand were engaged and most probably remembered the brand because they had fun on their stand.

I attended three of the free seminars on the day, as most were extremely busy, which made it hard to hear what the speaker was saying. Despite this, I sat in on a talk about 'harnessing the power of social media'. I found this talk very interesting and the presenter was a great public speaker. The main thing I took away from this seminar was the importance of monitoring a brands social media presence online in order to ensure users are directly involved with the brand in a positive way. Many successful brands have created their own user-generated content systems on their website, to allow consumers to openly talk about their brand, with no restrictions. This may seem like a dangerous tactic but by regularly monitoring this space and responding directly to negative feedback, brands are able to get consumer feedback in real-time which saves a huge amount of market research costs.

In terms of why I visited, I am fairly new to the digital SEO/PPC world and wanted to get a grasp of how other organisations other than mine presented themselves. One thing I noticed quite a few times was various companies' questioning companies that charge upfront fees. They claimed up-front fee's do not drive companies to achieve goals but having come from a company that does charge upfront fee's I can safety say that this is not true, in fact I think we would be quite ashamed if we were to charge someone for effectively doing nothing.

In this day and age positive WOM is vital and for us it's important we come off as what we are; as an ethical company with our client's ROI in mind at all times.

The best free gift of the day was given out by a company called Toluna. They gave out what could be described as a Lego man USB stick. I thought this was very cool, however they clearly missed a trick by not branding this, as I couldn't remember who it came from when I got home.

I think anyone who works for an agency like ours should definitely make sure they either present or visit the Adtech conference, as it's an insightful event.