What we learned at the fifth Beers & Innovations

The fifth B&I event was held last night in the downstairs bar of Albannach in Trafalgar Square, speakers Paul Pod of Tioti, Umair of Bubblegeneration and Richard of Reevoo. Amongst the people I bumped into (or forcibly accosted) were of course Deirdre who runs the B&I events, George Nimeh of i-boy fame, Simon of MarketClusters and an extraordinarily tall man called Tom from the Economist. I can't really claim to have bumped into either my friend Andrew from Thoughtplay or Dave who I work with at AND since I'd arranged in advance to meet the former and arrived with the latter.

The Q&A part of the evening will doubtless be blogged elsewhere, so I'll just touch on things that came up in conversation later in the evening. Two things stand out for me. One is the Economist's Project Red Stripe, a slightly clandestine effort on the part of the group to do something imaginative with their brand online - it'll be fascinating to see what comes out at the other end of the process. The second is to do with Reevoo.

Richard, Reevoo's CEO, made some interesting comments about the site's ability to deliver impartial, post-transaction reviews of products. Chatting to one of his colleagues later (whose name I'm afraid I didn't catch), I discovered that as well as encouraging purchasers to write reviews, they're also experimenting with sending out previous reviews and getting purchasers to comment on those. Which is an interesting enough strategy itself, but led me to speculate that the obvious endgame for that strategy would be to let the manufacturers or distributors write reviews of their own products in the knowledge that their purchasers would then be able to comment on the veracity of the claims therein. This is, I think, one of the redefinitions of branding  opportunities of which Umair is fond - for product (and service) providers to engage directly with their audiences in ways that necessitate an honest and balanced assessment of their own goods. Reevoo, I think, has a bigger opportunity here than it really lets on, and I look forward to seeing them seize it.