Zeddigital Conference

I spent a couple of days in Marrakech last week at a 'summit' attended by representatives of many of our offices around the world. As an advertising network we're really picking up some steam. Unfortunately, I missed most of the sessions due to a meeting on the first day of the conference - Marrakech isn't that easy to get to, even from London.

There were a couple of highlights from my half-day of sessions though.

One was a presentation by Joel Lunenfeld, who's a SVP at Moxie Interactive a US-based full service digital agency that was recently acquired by Publicis Groupe. They have a strong client list and are doing some great work, joining up creative, media, web development and data mining. I'm sure that there will be lots of opportunities to learn from them.

The other highlight was having a chat with Jarek Sosinski, a digital planner in our Polish office. Poland is a really interesting market to keep an eye on. It's rapidly growing into an economic contender and the impact is definitely being felt in the online advertising business. Jarek was telling me, though, that there are very few 'global' online brands operating effectively in Poland. Audiences are large and growing and usage is high but the only non-Polish brand that has succeeded in imposing itself is Google.

I get the impression that Poles like to do things there own way - if sites don't develop Polish versions (English still isn't common for adults there) then they're sufficiently entrepreneurial to develop their own content. They have, for instance, their own portals, their own advertising formats and their own instant messenger technology.

The market forces in Poland are such that things are developing at different paces than in other markets. Of all our offices they are the most experienced at engaging in forums and bulletin boards (i.e. User Generated Content 0.9). They're currently planning a campaign for one of our UK clients, advertising bank accounts to Poles planning to move to London.

Jarek and I also had a chuckle about Windows Vista - depending on the anti-piracy coding in it Poland may well adopt it faster then any other market in Europe.