San Diego - Day 1.5

With sheer volume of stuff going on, people to see and drinks to consume, I forgot to blog about the presentation Gareth and I gave. On the whole it seemed to go OK - lots of people being nice about it afterwards at least. We'll post it on slideshare after today and I'll be able to reflect a little better on it then.

I popped in to Adrian and Rob's presentation about the future of planning, which unsurprisingly and rightly, looks like what they are building.

What they are arguing (and demonstrating) is that marketing can truly add value to people as well as to companies. This means looking at what we do from an entirely different angle - not a messaging based activity but one of belief and action. It's a shame, however, that to do real consulting stuff (even web 2.0 based consulting) they had to leave the ad industry. Adrian may have said one of the most Radical things at the conference when he admitted that the biggest barrier to doing what they thought was right in an agency was the creative department.

Another person taking this approach to marketing is Eric Ryan (from Methods ), who gave us some great stuff this morning. He has built the company a planner would/should if they put their words into action. It's a belief based company that is founded on a way of re-framing an old category: making cleaning about a lifestyle (or as he put it, the fusion of style and substance).

With a small budget, the focus on making the products be the marketing, continually innovating and producing at a fantastic rate. As Eric put it, it only costs Method $200 k to launch a new product which seems like a very wise marketing investment. To do this well, the company knows they need to pay a huge amount of attention to their internal culture - getting that right to get the products right.