Affino Stamps its Mark on the PPA Festival - Sponsorship and Participation

Green Acorn-sponsored goody bag came with 2-sided gloss Affino Flyer - with the Power campaign Ad on the front, and Affino Onboard campaign Ad on the reverse!

There were a couple of other nice items ... but inevitably I lost my bag over the course of the day. Happens at every event!

Relatively few decided to avail themselves of a Booth - Affino prefers to be wholly free-range and free-roving at such an event - booths somewhat restrict your movements and floorspace coverage to a degree. And it's often easier to intercept people while you're both on the move!

The space was very useful though for watching the keynote presentation when the main auditorium was full, and it filled up nicely for networking as the day wore on.

The keynote speech was well attended, standing room only for the state of the industry speeches and initial panel.

There were quite a few mentions of Platforms, including the on again off again relationship between news providers and Facebook - with the news that Facebook is again going to down-rank news content.

It will be great next time to hear a mention of the immensely supportive tech platform for UK media, not least Affino.

We loved the stream naming and colours at the PPA Festival. They all resonated well and the auditoria were very welcoming. They also looked great when empty.

Media is all about talent. It is also one of the most fluid industries with talent coming and going at a high pace for media companies. It will be interesting to see a presentation on how best to engage with and retain digital product talent at a future event.

One of the best attended panels of the day was the Metaverse and Web 3 one. Izzy Farmiloe in particular was very impressive in her insight on the new developments and Dazed's report on some of the upcoming tech.

I would have LOVED to see a Gen Z up on the stage, or even a younger Gen X. We would have had a very different panel. Having a number of kids in the age group It's clear that they're already living within these spaces daily and they're called Minecraft, Roblox, Genshin et al. They will bring this with them and it's hard to see how digital spaces won't be a dominant form commercially in the future as the younger generation brings it forward with them.

From a technologist perspective - much / most of what we see in Web 3 today was covered in a host of ways way back in the early days of the web and didn't take off. It's funny to see how with very flakey / untrustworthy and ultimately entirely owned-non-public-ecosystems which is the reality of Web 3 today it's going to be much different this time around.

Unless governments mandate and invest in open publicly owned spaces and platforms it will ultimately all be owned by a very small number of people, the same as today.

I didn't entirely get this panel. The participants highlighted that they were barely 10% to 20% down the road on the data journey. Almost any Affino media / publishing client would be way ahead of them and have a far greater level of audience insight to these panelists.

Most of their companies are seemingly reliant on already redundant 3rd party cookie based technologies (and are even recommending them). Some are even trying to build their own stack, why? 

PPA, please reach out to us next time and we can recommend dozens of publishing companies who are way further down the audience data and engagement journeys, with killer real world case studies and experience of making audience data work for them.

We had a really limited slot for the round table, only 30 mins. In reality these can't be meaningfully covered in the round table format in less than 1 hour. Something we'll mention for the next time. Also ... everything was running 5 mins late, and with full auditoria people who wanted nice seats had to leave 5 mins early. Giving only 20 mins for the round table. This was a real shame as we should have had them down for 1 hour and people could have stayed for the duration.

Because time was of the essence we prepped a nice 'cheat sheet' covering the basics. We find these to be really useful in any case as a conversation starter and aide memoir after the event.

We had by far the busiest round table at the event with participants two rows deep around much of the table. Some great questions and topics of conversation including:

• How far to take legitimate interest
• How best to extend data records
• How to capture and keep your data in the best way (server side)
• The death of 3rd party cookie based data
• Some great cases like The Stage's data insight which informs them of the content which drives sales (in real time)

We had some great roundtable discussions in the very brief time slot we had. Next time we'll hope to have more time for introductions and delving into the areas we are all looking to cover in the session.

It was hard to fault any aspect of the roundtable space, with great refreshments on tap and even a greeter.

It was great to meet up with Jonathan Collins of JCA Associates. It's been a while since we last met and this was a very pleasant lunch in the sun. Many thanks JC.