The recently opened Park Plaza Westminster Bridge played host to the 2010 EMEA Engage Conference. This striking modern building with it's iconic views of the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and the London Eye was the perfect fit for this year's theme - Art & Science.
Nick Sharp VP & General Manager, EMEA and Australasia opened the event asking delegates to join in as we explore how the intersection of the two elements is vital to the delivery of successful marketing. He extended a warm welcome to many returning guests who made last year such a success, as well as the many new faces who joined for the first time.
The morning plenary session held keynote presentations from
Joe Stanhope, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research on
The Digital Marketing Landscape and
David Rowan from Wired UK on
Trends That Are Disrupting Your Business. We heard from
Alex Yoder - CEO, Webtrends and Julian Brewer - Barclays, PLC on what the future holds for marketers and
Christian Howes who played the master of cermonies role through the day shared his views on "Our Disposable Society".
In the afternoon
Casey Carey and Bruce Kenny spoke about the product vision in their talk
Webtrends - The Way Ahead which was followed by an open Q&A. Dry ice and mints played a part in the closing of Day One with
Heston Blumenthal, chef and culinary alchemist with his visionary thoughts on what Art and Science means to him.
The event continued on through the evening as the crowds spread throughout the
partner pavilion for a fantastic party featuring the legendary
Paul "Trouble" Anderson. Many thanks to Exact Target for hosting the music and live entertainment. Here is a bit of what was going on in the Twitterverse today around the conference:
- TommyFlisher here you go marketers, ten tips from @wireduk's editor david rowan #wtengage http://twitpic.com/2yzbuk
- portland_friend David Rowan @ #webtrends Engage: showed #whipcar as example of how disruptive social media will be in markplace. Very interesting
- jacqueswarren Great 1st day at @webtrends #wtengage with excellent keynotes. So far, a smashing success as they say here!
- VineshC 5 things 2 expect from webtrends 1.Agility 2.User Experience 3.Web Wide Innovation 4.Openness & Standards 5.WebScale Performance #wtengage
- justinkistner From 2008 to 2010 Forrester has seen the amount of inactive social media participants go down and the highly engaged go up #wtengage
- Sunrayfr "optimization is a printing press for money" I love that! #wtengage
- zoros1976 In all of human civilization through 2003 we created 5 exabytes of data. We now create that every 2 days & the pace is increasing. #wtengage
- georgioskap Heston Blumenthal gave an amazing speech at #wtengage. Apparently, he does lots of testing for dishes & thinking about customer experience
Tomorrow holds a full day of sessions with customer stories, industry panels, product demonstrations, tips n' tricks and more. Whether you're a social media guru or looking to become one, the go-to person for ecommerce or an online marketer these breakouts will have something for everyone.
All of the presentations, videos and pictures from the event will be available in the
Engage Conference Media Gallery.
