There is a lot of talk in business circles about the web, internet marketing, measure this and measure that, digital networking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and the like, but if you want to have a conversation with the leading edge, then TFM&A is the place to go.

Our annual company outing is not to Wimbledon or the races, not for us seats in the drafty grounds of some lower league football team, but the crumbling and soon to be replaced Earls Court exhibition halls in West London. It’s all rock and roll for us.

But this is a serious visit to see what is happening on the event horizon of the digital age. Bright young things from every walk of binary life flit and chatter, accost and inform through the stands and walkways emblazoned with logos of many of the biggest names in the online marketing world. It’s a big show with well over 200 exhibitors.

We go to watch, to learn, to talk and be talked to, to try to ask questions that our business clients want answered.

For every aspect of communication there is a new way of recording and analysing, new approaches to sending, receiving and parsing messages, and as we are marketing and online communication specialists, this is our bread and butter. As the number of ways of communicating expand and spread their tentacles in every aspect of business and life, a company message can be altered, broken down, finessed and fed back on to an almost infinite degree. The companies at Earls Court represent the granular end-game of digital marketing, the ever-increasing technical approach to squeezing more and more juice out of each message created.

The bulk of the companies exhibiting were specialists in providing high-end consumer products, because this is where the bulk of the money is.

I think the most important thing we got out of the event was the affirmation from the leading players in the field that what we do and how we do it is well up to the mark, and as good as anyone else. We couldn’t find any areas where we were lacking and It was hard to find any great innovations to shout about at all – one company was demonstrating age and gender recognition software using hi-end cameras, which had a novelty value (although a bit creepy) and I’m sure with a great future in retailing. What really stood out for us was the focus on measurement and segmentation, the desire to collect and analyse every last drop of data – understandable when you consider the amount of money the large consumer businesses lavish on online marketing.

We were hoping there would be more mobile marketing developments, as this is going to be an area of enormous growth over the coming year or so. But I think we are ahead of the thinking here. For instance, geo-fence marketing is only just starting to appear in the UK and it’s an area of mobile marketing to keep your eyes on because it is going to offer the smaller retailers the opportunity to compete more evenly with the bigger players through exciting new location-based services. Just remember, you heard it here first.