Agency.com collecting awards ... The Movie

Agency.com Brussels won two important awards this week at the "Night of the Internet". These are the most prestigeous awards in the online world in Belgium, so we're quite happy about that.

The first one was for site(s) we developped for Levis paints. We won the GOLD for Best Business site. Go have a look and especially check out the sub-brand sites for "Colores Del Mundo" and "Ambiance".
The second award is something special. For the first time an advertiser (Eurostar) was awarded as "Best Publisher" for "The London Tapes podcast". A milestone in advertising if you ask me, the perfect proof of the fact that the lines between content and advertising are blurring.

"The Night of the Internet" followed the "Customer First" event, and if you want to get an idea of how it looked, check out this movie made by my collegue Xavier:

http://eyespot.com/flash/flvplayer.swf?contextId=11&vurl=http%3A%2F%2Fdownloads.eyespot.com%2Fplay%3Fr%3DeVEXaw0067yryz90iriEJW02IW4k05

Ideas, conferences, podcasts ... life's great

I just came back from a very interresting meeting in London with our Agency.com collegues worldwide. A lot of great strategic thinking there, nothing I can talk about but ... keep an eye on us :-)

This morning I listened to Joseph Jaffe's last podcast show, and hurray! I'm in it. The subject we launched (how to measure engagement generated through interactive media) is one to persue on longer term. So please react, give your opinion, etc. If we as a community can come up with some answers I promise I'll put it in a whitepaper. Let's do some open-source-style collaboration in developing the communications trade here.

Got some speaking opportunities coming up too. Tomorrow I'm talking about some of the award-winning work we did for Eurostar in a highschool in Ghent. It seems students need to be motivated to choose for interactive marketing as opposed to traditional advertising. The appeal of a making a TV-spot still appears to be higher then building compelling interactive experiences. I find that very strange, so looking forward to chat with these youngsters and motivate them for the marketing of the future.

Lastly, I'm also in a panel at the "customer first" event, talking about blogs. I'm proud to be in the panel with some cool likeminded bloggers: Kris Hoet, Clo Willaert and Jean Paul Declercq. The discussion is moderated by Marco Derksen from Marketingfacts.nl. Looking forward to that too.