At the invitation of my amazing banker at CIBC, I attended the Google Partners Inspire event in Vancouver, which was held at the gorgeous Rosewood Georgia Hotel. I wasn’t sure what this was about, but upon checking the speaker roster, I noticed an interesting line up of speakers, including my good friend Chris Breikss over at 6s Marketing.
The sessions were great, and varied. First off, a keynote address from Fab Dolan discussed the future of Internet Marketing. It was interesting to learn about some of the technology that drives marketing in today’s landscape, and to get a glimpse of some of the predictive analysis that is coming in the near future – for example: Let’s say you have an appointment at 2pm with a potential client. You know the cross street, but need the exact address, upon going in to search for it, based on your calendar entry and your current location, Google may offer up the exact thing you were looking for before you even search for it…. Pretty crazy.
Chris Phillips from Wasserman + Partners Advertising Agency gave a good talk on Search Ads
Chris Breikss spoke about Mobile – I didn’t expect to know so little about Mobile (insofar as Marketing is concerned), and was amazed at the tools available for marketing directly to Mobile devices. Also shocking was a stat he showed of the Vancouver Sun having had more than half of their web traffic from mobile devices recently.
Google had some of their own present as well, and John Black gave a great presentation on video, revealing that Canadians are the world’s largest consumer of video on YouTube! Interesting…But more interesting were some of the YouTube analytics tools that are available that I didn’t know existed. Many companies market directly through YouTube, so these analytics make total sense. Here’s a welcome page: http://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/yt-analytics.html
In the afternoon we had sessions on “Measuring Digital ROI” (Carlos Obregon – Bloom Digital Marketing) and Agile Creativity (Snaptech Marketing), which were both great. Snaptech actually showed a couple of great case studies, including Warline Painting (whom I just had paint my place, and did an amazing job!). The case studies they showed really highlighted the value of working with a proper Digital Marketing Agency (DMA), who can look at your digital world holistically to ensure your strategy is really sound.
All in all, I had a great time, learned a ton, and realized that we have some AWESOME companies in Vancouver delivering amazing value in the Digital Marketing realm.
Check out the Google Partners page here: