Alas I was not there at CJU this year so instead of telling you all about how sad that made me I thought it would be much more interesting to interview Luke Judge of Net Media Planet about his experiences there.

So how did you end up at CJU US?

One cold winter afternoon in early January my CJ UK Account Manager sent me news of a CJ UK competition that involved me taking a photo of the CJ UK team photo (wow – that’s a mouthful – Editor’s note, you can read all about it here) in an interesting place or situation. After racking my brains for 0.315624 seconds and generating 215.897034 results I had the smart idea of taking CJ UK to Las Vegas for the week. The next day I was off to London Heathrow and aboard a Virgin Atlantic flight. THe CJ UK team were with me at every stage, occupying the space in my inner jacket pocket between the pen, sunglasses and cuban cigar.

A few days later I had a handful of great photos with CJ UK all over Las Vegas. Thanks has to go to the brilliant support provided by photographer elect, Magnus Nilsson, for his creative input and support.

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What a fantastic couple of days it has been at the London A4U Expo. It genuinely does seem that each year gets better, with the usual faces and fresh new faces in abundance. The event must be one of the best networking events in the UK. We are usually such a reticent bunch – comparing US (where power networking is the norm) events to UK ones just highlights to me how bad we tend to be at chatting to people we don’t know. None of that has ever been in evidence at the A4U Expo’s though – where the atmosphere is always very welcoming and relaxed.

That said – the first thing I saw when I ascended up the escalator on the first morning was a short, menacing squirrel. Scary, really scary. The picture is blurry because my hands were literally shaking with fear!

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We have a wealth of new CJ starters for me to introduce to you over the next few weeks. I will start with the lovely Marta who has been employed as an Account Executive in Emmanuel’s team after a very successful internship. Yes, she joined us AFTER she had worked with us for a while. This means she must like us.

This is what Marta looks like (she is less blurry in real life!):

As Marta is not backward in coming forwards I will introduce her with a little interview.

I can tell from your accent (and the fact that you talk in Spanish with Brezo) that you are from Spain. Tell me about it:

Everytime someone asks me where I am from I think about making up a story about a terribley exciting place as nobody has heard of my home town, Logrono. I then explain to people that this is in the Rioja region. Automatically they smile, as if I am going to pull a bottle of red wine from my handbag.

Anyway, Logrono is a nice place worth a visit. There is a very popular road called Laurel Street where you can eat the most amazing tapas you could ever imagine – better than Brezo’s tortilla (Editor’s note – Marta is a liar, NOTHING is better than Brezo’s tortilla).

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Every so often we allow people to leave the CJ offices for important events and client meetings etc. A few weeks ago we allowed Roger, Cheryl and Tom out to go to the Argos Supplier Summit which was held at Wembley. They were joined by a few publishers and Argos’ other digital suppliers.

The event was a chance to discuss Argos’ website and promotional activities across all digital channels and to look at how that integrates with offline promotions.They discussed what they were seeing in terms of trends and then planned on how to capitalise on these trends. These events are key to Argos’ multi-channel success which was, in case you forgot, one of the two awards that they picked up at the A4U awards earlier this year.

The event also provided Roger with an opportunity to hold the FA Cup. He was very happy – look!

We are also allowing people out for the A4U Expo next week. We are sponsors and will be at all networking events as well as manning stand 20. We hope that you will be allowed out to join us – see you there!