November 30th Breakfast Briefing - Monetising Content and Affino Roadmap

The weather gods smiled on us this last Friday when around 50 or so Clients, interested parties and Affino staffers convened at the One Alfred Place Store Street Lounge for the key annual Affino State of the Union Address. Sitting midway along Tottenham Court Road - light flows in through three sides of rather generously placed tall arched windows - the superbly naturally-lit space would make for an excellent art atelier.

Guest Speakers on this occasion were Marjan Askins, Head of Digital and Matt Lambourne, Digital Analyst at AgriBriefing (Farmers Guardian / FG Insight) - who presented two case studies on how Affino had empowered them to better leverage their content and advertising by use of dedicated Topic Hubs which were able to draw in significantly more sponsorship than individual features or pages.

The presentations touched on departmental restructuring and how critical it was to have Editorial working together with Marketing and Technical. What essentially makes their take on Native Advertising and Topic Hubs work is having a fully empowered senior editor taking the lead - with direct responsibilities to the commercial departments too. In-house generated Native Advertising requires a very high degree of authenticity and necessitates strict guidelines on editorial voice and ’spin’ with final copy approval sitting with the editorial team. A version of the presentation is available for Affino clients.

Affino CEO Markus Karlsson then guided the attendees through the development and innovation highlights of 2018, as well as what was on the Roadmap for 2019. In short, the focus for 2018 has been on GDPR, infrastructure, system optimisation and the customer journey - while 2019 looks more towards further empowering staff members in their use and deployment of Affino - with a significant enhancement of in-situ tools and analytics.

As always, light refreshments were provided in the guise of continental style pastries, juices, coffee and tea. The event was overwhelmingly an upbeat and positive affair with much to look forward to in the forthcoming months. We are looking to significantly increase our event programme for next year - in particular in the areas of client networking, collaboration and steering committees. So if you are interested in participating, please let us know.

Feel free to contact Markus Karlsson and Jonathan Collins for further details about this event, or attendance and participation at future events.