The TL;DR from London's Festival of Marketing

Many of our clients sit on marketing teams tasked with creating content that’ll increase engagement, brand awareness or sell a new product. Jumbla’s UK head of production Laura Breaden went to the Festival of Marketing (FoM) to hear industry insiders’ predictions around upcoming trends in marketing, and to find out what’s working - and more importantly, what isn’t.  Here’s  her cheatsheet from the day.

What I learned from the festival in a nutshell

Be braver, smarter and take more risks. If there's one thing all keynote speakers at the FoM seemed to agree on, it's that the secret sauce for marketing always comes back to the creative. If it’s good it will get traction.

Five things marketing teams should start doing

According to Gabriela Lungu - CEO of Creative Consultancy, Wings, and Global Creative Director at Geometry - we should:

Make creative a business priority - too often, we endeavour to be creative but don't actually measure it. One way of measuring creativity? Ask your peers! How creative do they find your work? How is it perceived outside your own team? Be critical, honest and (try) to stop focusing on the return it needs to bring. That invariably stifles creative ideation.

Invest in innovation - take risks with pilot projects and give yourself permission to fail. The majority of your marketing can be safe and metric-friendly, but save at least 30% of your budget for something new and outside your comfort zone, like animating a product rather than trotting out a bunch of bullet points next to a blog image. Boring.

Keep yourself up-to-date - get up to speed on the latest campaigns, design trends and tech that everyone is using around you. Too often, we focus on the same platforms. The more inspiration you surround yourself with, the better output you’ll create.

Respect the creative process - working with agencies and studios is a collaborative process. It can take time to get to the winning idea, and they’ll always be better if they've had time to develop. Stay patient, avoid reviewing work before it's properly fleshed out, and give the creative team the best opportunity to present their work back to you.

Tango! This, Gabriela explained, was the perfect analogy for the client/studio relationship. The creatives should be the ones to lead the client around a dance floor and take them on a journey - or in other words, they should be the ones in charge. By contrast, the client should ideally be the ones to buckle up and enjoy the ride, knowing they're in practiced hands.

The next best thing

TikTok. (Does that put Jumbla ahead of the curve?)

Team up with a TikTok influencer (or influencers) who will bring their own creativity to your brand, and treat the platform like a TV channel. TikTok has a captive audience, and its short-form format is perfect for authentic, organic, social influence marketing.

Think its audience is only those between 18-24? Wrong! Grandparents are now their own niche market. Even the Washington Post is down with TikTok!

Final takeaways

Vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather Group Rory Sutherland says, “If we limit what we do [in marketing] based on what we can justify, we’ll end up like everyone else”. It sticks with me.

He’s not just talking about TikTok or influencer engagement. Smart marketing strategy now includes a whole range of technologies and approaches - like how pharmaceutical company GSK tests packaging concepts in VR, ensuring they're considered from (literally) every angle. Or Gregg’s cheeky animated launch video for its new, of-the-times vegan sausage roll.