JUMP Overboard
I’ve been a big fan of Econsultancy for years. Their research, training and other services are hugely valuable and their blog is a great source of information.
With that in mind, my expectations were high for their first JUMP event, held today at Old Billingsgate in London. Over 1,600 people attended and I’ve no doubt their expectations were pretty high too. Although many were fortunate enough to get a free invite from one of the event sponsors (thanks to Daniel and Alan at the marvelous Just Digital for mine), the full price was a whopping £895. To justify that sort of cost, an event has to deliver some serious value.
Billed as being “all about joining up online and offline marketing to get better results”, JUMP was aimed squarely at both digital and offline marketers. The day combined a packed conference schedule with exhibition stands from solution providers and the opportunity to network with industry peers. Running across five tracks, the conference agenda featured presentations from many high-profile names from leading brands. The level of interest was certainly very high and every session was full.
But did JUMP deliver the value it promised? Regrettably not. And that’s a real shame, because it could have been THE event of the year.
The organisation was efficient, but there was disappointment aplenty about the lack of wifi (at a “joined up” digital marketing conference) and astonishment that everyone got just one free coffee all day. Lunch was provided, although that wasn’t much to enthuse about either. These are the sorts of minor niggles that would be easily forgiven at many events, but with such a high ticket price they were an understandable source of dissatisfaction.
More importantly, the quality and content of the conference presentations were for the most part uninspiring, bland and very generalised. There’s a practical limit to how much useful information can be delivered in under 30 minutes of course, but other conferences manage it and there seemed to be virtually no attempt to give people specific actionable ‘takeaways’.
As a number of people commented to me, there were lots of buzzwords, lots of talk about multi-channel this and joined-up that, and a nauseating number of people claiming that “this is new” (which it most certainly isn’t). Overall, it was all rather underwhelming and lacking in substance.
Even the panel sessions I attended (in the ‘Lead’ and ‘Optimise’ tracks) didn’t deliver anything that five minutes on Google wouldn’t. The consistent theme of the questions coming from the floor was social media and its integration with search engine marketing. I’m not convinced anyone discovered anything helpful, but perhaps the basic nature of the questions is evidence of a persistent demand (even from contemporary marketing professionals) for generalised signposting and reiteration rather than powerful insight.
The feedback being posted on Twitter tonight with the #JUMP hashtag is mixed. Some people seem delighted with the day. Others clearly have opinions closer to mine and are sharing “disappointment” and being “very cross”.
Trying to pick some positive bones out of the day, it was encouraging to hear how the importance of intelligent analytics is accepted as a fundamental element of successful digital marketing. There were also votes of confidence in the value of research and consultancy, as well as some enlightened emphasis on business cultural change and staff training and development.
Of the presentations I saw, “Truly Social” by Rowan Gormley of Naked Wines was the only highlight. The ‘Naked’ business model, and indeed their whole ethos, is inspiring and refreshing. They’re one of the very few businesses (not just in the UK) who really “get it”. Smart CEOs and Marketing Directors would do very well to learn by their example. The thread of comments about Naked Wines on the Econsultancy site from earlier this year provides a great example of social media in action and the benefits of having loyal and highly-engaged customers.
Lastly, I’d like to congratulate Paul Walsh and his team at Infinity Tracking for launching their cross channel solution that “closes the loop” between online and offline goal tracking. If the integration of meaningful call tracking into your analytics is relevant to your business, I’d recommend you find out more.
If you were in the crowd at JUMP today, what were your impressions and highlights?
Excellent and fair review Iain. I think I came to a similar conclusion with my own on our blog.
Hi Iain,
I’m sorry to hear that you didn’t gain as much value as you’d have liked from JUMP, but I’m pleased you enjoyed some of the sessions. Thanks for all your comments, there’s certainly some very useful points here and your thoughts do echo some of the things I’ve heard from others on Twitter. Obviously JUMP was a learning experience for us and overall we are pleased with how things went and feel that we provided a valuable experience for the majority of attendees, however I agree that there are some changes to be made in time for next year. We’re currently taking time to gather feedback and will be making a few tweaks going forward (although I can’t offer any guarantees about the quality of the coffee just yet I’m afraid).
So far we’re seeing four areas where we think we can improve things.
Firstly, there were instances where people couldn’t get in to their chosen sessions. We did take extreme care not to overbook any of the rooms but obviously there was room for error here. Going forward we’ll be tying the prebooking more directly into the registration process to ensure against this. I’ve only heard of one instance where a client who had prebooked was refused entrance to a session (if there are any others out there then do please let me know), and I agree that this absolutely should not have happened, and can only assume this was an unfortunate consequence of the general chaos as the early sessions filled. We did work hard to fix this as the day progressed but I can only apologise for any such instances, I have spoken to others who had not prebooked however and they’ve told me they did get into the majority of sessions they attended, so while it wasn’t a widespread problem, I understand how frustrating this was for anyone who has invested their time and money in coming. If anyone experienced recurring problems then do please get in touch with me directly: matt.owen@econsultancy.com
I should also mention lack of wi-fi, as it does seem to be a major niggle. We did consult with a number of providers before the event but found ourselves in an unfortunate space between prohibitive expense and no guarantee of reliability. Unfortunately the venue could only offer coverage for around 500 people – I’ve attended events myself in the past where connectivity has dropped out regularly and have found this more frustrating than simply using my phone. I understand some networks had poor reception on the day, but ultimately we decided it would be easier to rely on phones than a frustrating and shaky wi-fi network. Again, we’ll certainly be looking into this (and the presence of phone charging) in time for our next event.
Finally, I should talk about the sessions themselves. I know that a few attendees felt that some lacked depth or were too pitch-ey in tone. Obviously we’d never dictate editorial policy to speakers, and I do feel that in general this was kept to a reasonable minimum. As far as depth goes, I should say that the multi-channel market still represents very new ground for many companies. As such we’ve always striven to provide straightforward, practical and understandable content, although I agree it would be nice to include some ‘expert-level’ briefings and longer Q&A sessions in the future.
Again, we apologise if anyone experienced frustration or was unpleased with content on the day – we’re working on it and all the feedback has been extremely constructive and helpful so we will be making changes o the organisation in time for next year.
Many thanks for taking the time to post on the event, and again, I welcome any direct feedback from yourself and your readers.
Thanks again,
Matt Owen
Social Media Producer @Econsultancy.com
You make some good points here, and to be fair they don’t just apply to Jump. A few other conferences may manage to deliver insightful content into 20/30 minute slots, but most in my experience don’t. Or at least, they don’t delivery nearly as much as they could do if the number of speakers was reduced and session length increased. It’s something I’ve complained about at several search conferences. They try so hard to accommodate every speaker available that they end up dividing hour-long sessions into 3 or 4 slots, which is bad enough in itself, but then the subject matter is un-coordinated so what the audience quite often get is several almost identical whiz-throughs.