TFM&A (or Technology For Marketers and Advertisers to give it its full due) is one of a round of industry events where suppliers and speakers press the flesh with clients, potential clients and rivals. Presumably through gritted teeth.
It’s often hard to discern much useful at such events because of the inevitable self-promotion that’s going on. The number of ‘leading analytics providers’ is quite something to behold! However, this year I felt there was a slight change from past events. Quite a lot of the stands were smaller and less elaborate than you might be used to – suggesting that the tightening of belts is extending from clients to their agencies. No dry ice and TV walls this year. That even fed into a paucity of quality free gifts, and I had to content myself with a handful of branded pens and some Fox’s Glacier Fruits.
On a more serious note, the seminars – which are largely puff pieces for some agency product or other – were packed to the rafters, with queues snaking around the booths half an hour before they began. This suggests to me that the hunger for online channels is increasing as margins and ROI get squeezed elsewhere and pressure grows for internal marketing people to actually start understanding “online”.
The content of the seminars was the usual array of People Talking About Stuff, but I did detect a more than usual emphasis on data. Data is one of the things that the internet is supposed to be good at, yet compared to the sophistication of DM I still feel its potential isn’t often tapped out by any but the savviest companies. As 2009 shapes up to a year where the cost of getting a new customer will soar, squeezing every drop out of that customer becomes ever more important.
Email marketing, transactional marketing and profile building will be growth areas, and data capture and cleaning companies should have a boom year as a result. Of course, that means a squeeze on other areas and I see nothing to revise earlier thoughts about the impact of the credit crunch on traditional broadcast marketing as a result.
Oh – and if you go to Earl’s Court for anything similar this year, there’s a well good kebab house round the corner. I base that information solely on the basis of a picture of an extremely noxious looking kebab stick they had outside. I might not know about the internets, but I knows kebabs!