Marketing Junto | Digital Summit Philadelphia Take-Aways

For the past two days I was a the Digital Summit in beautiful Philadelphia. It was jam-packed with amazing sessions and great networking. Many of the leading marketing brands and speakers spoke and mingled with the attendees.

Some of the best sessions, not-surprisingly, were on email marketing, SEO/SEM, and conversion optimization.

The keynote given by Jenny Haggard of Spotify, was incredible. Not surprisingly, she talked about the power of sound and silence and it's affect on people. What did surprise me was her take on silence and how much silence she incorporates into her daily life. A big take-away was that sound effects us in ways that the other senses don't. Jenny pointed out that noise can cause damage. Too much noise can effect how kids learn in school and how people concentrate. But silence is good for the body and helps rejuvenate your body.

After the keynote, I found some great talks, but what was interesting was how some talks about similar things sometime contradicted each other. For example Greg Gifford of Search Lab Digital definitely had some counter points to Rachel Hernandez's (of The Hoth) tips on blogging and the frequency and the amount of words. But I guess that's to be expected, the whole search industry is always contradicting itself, because no on quite knows what Google and the other search engines are up to exactly.

One talk that stood out for me the most was Kent Lewis' talk on brands and the metaverse. Not only was he very funny and entertaining, he showed how brands are capitalizing on the various metaverse universes and how brands should engage in this newish ecosystem.

On the whole, the conference was fabulous. And to top it off, for around $500 for a pass, it was quite affordable.

If you have a chance to go next year or catch one of them in a city near you, I highly recommend you take two days and go.

Articles Of Note

• Why you should give Google Analytics 4 a chance
  To a degree I agree with the author here. GA4 might be something really special and work really well. As humans and especially marketers, we don't like change. What I take issue with is Google forcing people over to GA4 and sunsetting Universal Analytics. Especially when GA4 seems to still need some work and education around it.
• Why we care about AR and VR: A guide for marketers
  Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are going to be the future. Starting with Second Life back in the late part of the first decade of the 2000's to now, marketers have been intrigued with these spaces. Now with more people owning VR headsets and phones being able to show AR data, this is a new frontier that marketers are itching to learn how to use to reach their customers. If done right, campaigns will be brilliant.
• YouTube delivers bigger, more engaged audiences: Podtrac
  This doesn't surprise me. YouTube is the second biggest search engine after it's mothership — Google. As podcasters, if we're not putting our shows up on YouTube we're missing out on some great traffic and exposure. Tip: Check out Headliner.app for an easy way to get your shows up on to YouTube automatically.

That's it for the articles this week. I'll be sure to bring more to the table next week, when the week isn't shortened by a conference.

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Until next week!

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