Working for OKO Digital, the opportunities for attending various industry events are numerous. As much as we’d love to regularly break out from the office confines, the reality is: there just isn’t time to attend them all, so we have to choose.
Kelvin Newman is a familiar face and name to many, within the world of web. With an extensive catalogue of already well attended gatherings, his newest baby – Biddable World – was always going to prick the interest of those who live and breathe digital. In this instance, the focus was on paid search and biddable media, and how we can help clients (or our own in house sites) perform better in this sector.
Knowledge on tap
OKO rebranded last year, to keep up with the times and stay ahead of the ever flexing digital curve. We were also officially recognised by the Big G (Google if anyone’s in doubt!) as the UK’s first, and only, AdSense Certified Partner. Biddable World therefore appealed – even with the event’s sights aimed at the ‘other’ side of the fence.
As is customary with these shindigs, Kelvin managed to entice a plethora of industry ‘oracles’ into taking to the stage, with the purpose of broadcasting pearls of wisdom to help make all our jobs easier. It doesn’t matter if you’re an agency dealing with demanding clients or a company tasked with increasing the performance of your own portfolio, there’s always something you can take away.
Highlights
Throughout the day topics such as facebook and twitter advertising campaign strategy fell under the microscope, black hat PPC (not as dodgy as it sounds) reared its head and improving your AdWords quality scores put in an appearance. The latter, arguably, received the biggest reaction and was presented by Koozai’s Tara Dee West, who imparted some seriously good tips about improving quality scores.
John Wear was another fascinating addition to the line-up of speakers. Learning how his company, Xelsion, works with advertisers and puts together campaigns for roll out across multiple ad networks, was enlightening.
As Google AdSense partners it’s always insightful to hear what goes on ‘over the wall’ and John’s presentation threw up a few tit bits that promoted much fidgeting from Mat Bennett (OKO boss man).
Dark Side of the Moon
Undoubtedly, one of the most memorable sections of Biddable World was when Nick Christian, Head of Flights PPC at LastMinute.com, unveiled his, now infamous, Dark Side of the Moon album artwork slide.
Cannibalised to represent PPC profitability – now known as the PPC profitability pyramid – this was a stroke of genius and promoted much hilarity. Pink Floyd will, no doubt, be rolling in their graves, but it demonstrated the point perfectly – it’ll also remain forever etched in the memories of those attending Biddable World 2014.
Multiculturism
Nandita Patkar’s (Oban Multilingual’s Head of Paid Search) presentation was another that resonated. Her (non-offensive!) jokes about Hawaiians and Japanese may have bombed (as intended) but at least they helped make her point.
As markets expand, and our world shrinks even further, it makes total sense to expand our global understanding. Working alongside other nationalities, we need to have in depth knowledge of the products we’re tooled with, but we also need to grasp the intricacies of local market places and become culturally enriched, educated and familiar.
If we use humour, for instance, to encourage ad clicks, we need to know what makes other nationalities smile. What gets us guffawing and spitting out our tea won’t necessarily have the desired reaction in Thailand or Brazil.
Summing up
This is just a small snapshot of what went down at this year’s Biddable World, but highlights just how useful these gatherings can be and the importance of pooling information. Knowledge is power, as they say.
Although OKO sit on the opposite side of the road, to many who attended this year’s Biddable World – working with publishers to increase their AdSense earnings rather than rolling out advertising campaigns – there was still much to walk away with. The complimentary bevvy in the bar afterwards was also welcome – cheers for that!
One thing that was missing though was a presentation from an AdSense expert. Perhaps, if you’re reading Kelvin, OKO could help out on this front next year (wink, wink)?
We’re now looking forward to the next, highly anticipated BrightonSEO shindig, but with such good vibes from Biddable World, we’ll most definitely be back for next year’s event. Good work Mr Newman…
If you’re a publisher working in biddable media then we highly recommend attending and suggest you pay a visit in 2015 – you’d be daft to miss out.
You can find out more about the event at Biddable World
Mat has been supporting content creators on the web since 1996. As Co-founder of OKO Digital, Mat became the first person in the UK qualified to AdSense partner status and repeated this first with Google Certified Publishing Partner programme.
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