Doug BaxterWe came across an interesting initiative from io Advertising. On Thursday April 15th the agency will host a digital café in Stephen’s Green shopping centre. The plan is to offer free digital marketing advice to SMEs, entrepreneurs, and non-profit organisations.
“Large corporates and brands can afford to educate their marketing departments about developments in digital marketing but at a lower level many small business entrepreneurs don’t have access to such training and don’t have formal marketing experience. They will have good ideas but will often find it difficult to market these ideas effectively. We want to play a leadership role and explain the potential of new media to small businesses,” says Doug Baxter, CEO of io, pictured left.
The digital café will serve up advice on such issues as implementing measurable, cost-effective campaigns and using mobile channels, social networks, viral videos and digital PR.
“There has been a collective mistake by the marketing sector in this country and by the publishers over the past number of years,” argues Baxter, “in that marketing and media got greedy and the return on investment for advertisers didn’t equate with the spend. Many have been the architects of their own downfall and the value just wasn’t pegged to the investment. The aim of the digital café is to provide the vision to make new media channels, combined with traditional channels, effective and profitable.”
The participants in the digital café are io Advertising, Eircom Mobile, Enterprise Ireland, Electric Media, Sunday Business Post, Return 2Sender, The Persuaders and Areaman Productions.

You may also like: