Ed Cotton runs one of the most inspiring marketing blogs on the web, Influx Insights. They win a lot of readers with their fresh approach where they analyse current media stories to discuss consumer trends and marketing themes at a macro level. Next month Influx holds a future marketing conference in San Francisco.
Tell me about Influx Insights. What does your company do? How do the two overlap?
Influx Insights is the blog for Influx Strategic Consulting, a division of the communication agency BSSP. The consulting company helps brand position themselves and to better understand consumers and culture. The blog is almost a “zen-like” discipline, it forces us to be hyper- aware of what is going on and to develop a point of view on it.
How would you describe your approach to blogging, the content you offer?
There’s news and there’s perspective. We try to take news, that often hasn’t gotten much coverage and put a perspective on it that will be interesting to our readers.
How do you seek original inspiration for the topics covered and opinions made?
The blog is just the public face of what we do. Underneath it are themes, beliefs and ideas that Influx has about marketing’s future, how brands need to behave and the direction culture is moving in. It’s this thinking that helps guide and direct us to find relevant content for the blog.
In September you’re going to hold M-squared. Tell us a little about this. What’s the event going to offer attendees?
This is the second year Influx has hosted a marketing conference. Our inspiration was that the West Coast is often unfairly overlooked in the debate on the future of marketing. There are people out here that are doing things differently and are pretty amazing and inspiring. We thought we should get these speakers, together with a great audience and create interaction. The other thing is that most conferences for marketing people that I’ve been to are pretty sterile; they tend to be formulaic and its the same group of speakers doing infomercials, we wanted to change that. We had never organized a conference before and I think that helped bring some freshness, objectivity and unexpected chaos to the event.
In short, we want to engage our attendees in an interesting and provocative debate on the future of marketing. We are going to provide the stimulus with great speakers and we are encouraging our attendees to be vocal and participate. It’s about creating a dialog that can inspire them inside their organizations and one that we will continue to push with Influx Insights.
You have an interesting mix of speakers – what’s the rationale behind their choice?
In simple terms, like marketing itself, there are two aspects to the conference, thinking and doing. We want to cover both. Howard Rheingold and Chris Anderson are pre-eminent thinkers about the future. You just have to look at the web to see how much discussion there is around Smart Mobs and Long Tails. Two ideas that are forcing business to think differently with obvious knock-on effects in marketing.
Then there are the doers. Eric Ryan of Method and Karl Carter of Current TV are two marketers that are breaking the rules. Eric’s Ryan’s Method is one of the most audacious companies out there for having the guts to take on Unilever, Procter and SC Johnson in the household cleaning business. Current TV is “topic du jour” in the media world and are really out there changing the broadcasting model. Current really interests us because it is one of the few companies that is actively allowing the consumer to participate directly in their business.
Some of the speakers are very high profile. Did the blogging/ reputation of the blog help secure them?
I would like to think so.
Thank you.
Influx Insights
Influx M-Squared
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