A New Hope

A new term is about to start here at The University of Fun, and I notice that recruitment onto the BA in Digital Marketing Communications programme currently sits at 4 students. On top of that, I also notice that a number of students are opting to transfer in the second year of their degree programme from the Digital Marketing degree to a more traditional marketing and advertising programme that I also teach on.

Why might this be? Why aren’t people flocking to do the Digital programme (unlike the Masters programme of the same name which is pretty much “full”)? It’s difficult to understand why, when there are clear signs of a continued business leaning towards digital away from traditional. In these enlightened and recessional times, we keep seeing a path away from unmeasurable offline mechanisms towards more quantifiable digital communication levers.

Standing on my soapbox – I blame the teachers and careers officers in schools who have to kept up with the state of the industry. I blame the candidates for not researching the industry themselves and thinking that it’ll just be one long carry on into media. I blame the industry for not marketing itself to potential new recruits.

And I blame myself for not getting to enough careers fairs, schools and open days. But there are only 24 hours in a day.

You folks out there are going to have to help me out here and start pushing this industry not just to your potential customers but to your future workforce, because at the moment they don’t seem like they’re convinced.

Netimperative Roadshow

I had the good fortune and privilege to chair the Netimperative Manchester Roadshow yesterday – a fun gig that was well attended by service providers and client firms alike. Plenty of good speakers (and some okay ones!). For particular mention, I enjoyed the work Adam Parker from webitpr provided, which was a nice and gentle introduction for many in the audience to the whole online PR maze.

Martin Cozens from Latitude provided one of the most comprehensible and thorough understandings of the inner workings of Google: after – how many years in this game? – I now understand – a superb resume of SEO and PPC. A keynote from Martin Bowley was entertaining as we listened to how an old media lag has started to try and understand the new media marketing environment. And make money from it.

But I was particularly taken with the work Christopher Bennett is doing with Blyk, a free-to-use mobile phone service for the 16-24 market, the first really interesting and disruptive business model I have seen for ages where young adults agree to receive branded advertising messages in return for free calls and texts. I’m really excited about how that proposition works and look forward to seeing how it goes on in the future.

Netimperative could have had a rough ride coming and showing their country cousins all about digital, but to be honest, there was plenty of interesting new stuff and even a bit of controversy. There may be a recession coming, but I don’t think it’s going to reduce the work that’s going on there.