I Left My Heart
Afternoon tea at the National Portrait Gallery. Client meetings at a “football” club stadium. Racing to catch black cabs in the rain in The City. In a mere five days, Version 2.0 took London by storm with a a series of strategy sessions, new business pitches and networking meetings that has us crisscrossing the town from Heathrow to Shoreditch.
With Microgen, who is based in The City (London’s financial district), we talked about the ongoing pressures that their clients, including financial services companies, face, and the regulatory changes in that part of the world that have prompted other countries’ oversight agencies to take a closer look at their own strategies. A session to discuss how Microgen’s technology is supporting its clients as they work to achieve competitive advantage through better management of data and business processes included participants from Speed Communications, Microgen’s UK agency.
Speed joined us again for a lively brainstorming session with The InvisibleHand, a unique shopping service that was launched as part of the Forward Internet Group’s portfolio of companies. We generated new pitch ideas that are now serving as the map for our outreach strategy over the next several weeks.
We also spent some time with VBrick, a US-based client that is looking to turn up the volume on its UK presence, and Exony, a former V2 client that is revisiting its approach to PR. The conversation with VBrick took us all the way out to Reading and the grounds of the Reading Football Club , which is British English for “soccer.” Avoiding traffic on the M4 on the way back into town, our driver raced through the back streets around the airport and into London, where we made it to our Exony meeting only a few minutes behind schedule — which was a minor miracle, according to our client!
Our packed schedule left little time for sightseeing, but we managed to see the inside of some excellent restaurants and bars when we met with a London-based journalist with the Telegraph, and a former client contact who is now helping the Royal Bank of Scotland with its communications strategy. Based on the headlines we watched last week about RBS’s challenges, we think she has her work cut out for her — and is doing a bang-up job, as they say in Old Blightly.
And since we knew you’d ask: we didn’t manage a glimpse of the Royal Family but we did mange drive-bys of Buckingham Palace that coincided with the procession of the Queen’s Guard — a magnificent procession of white and black horses and shiny carriages.
After five days of back-to-back meetings, we’re fully recovered from the jet lag and energized by all the great ideas and innovative companies we’ve had a chance to talk with. Suffice to say our love affair with London has only just begun…
Tweet This Post No Comments » | March 3rd, 2010