🎤 What We Learned at The Big One
This month, Team EDGEY headed down to Big Penny Social for Team Marketing: The Big One, and we had a blast.
The room was packed with industry leaders and some of the sharpest minds in hospitality marketing. With loads to choose from, our highlights of the day:
☀️ Kirsty Hulse, Roar Training on the power of practical optimism: finding the positive in the everyday and retraining our brains to expect the best outcome, not the worst.
🤖 Aden Fraser, Guestwise ran an “AI in Anger” workshop, packed with practical ways to use AI to automate and schedule the reporting tasks that eat up your week.
🍝 Victor Lugger, Big Mamma on turning a unique concept into a growth machine without compromising on quality.
And of course, our very own Jack Edge took to the stage to host our panel, Winning The 2027 Guest. He was joined by a brilliant line-up:
- Natasha Naik, Comptoir Libanais
- Sam Hawker, Boxpark
- Catherine Wells, SushiDog
- Jonathan Lloyd, The Inn Collection Group
- Ruth Chan, BAM Karaoke Box
The consensus? 2027 looks less like mass marketing and more like truly understanding your guest and getting personal. Reaching more people matters less than reaching the right ones, with something that actually feels made for them.
Huge thanks to Team Marketing for having us, to our panellists for sharing so openly, and to everyone who came along.
Missed it? We're happy to share what we took away and what it means for your venues.
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🏆 From One to Watch to Shortlisted
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Last edition we told you we’d been named one of Prolific North’s Independent Agencies to Watch. This time, we’ve gone one better: EDGEY has been shortlisted for Independent Agency of the Year (Small) at the 2026 Prolific North Marketing Awards.
We’re up against some brilliant agencies from across the North, and we’re genuinely chuffed to be in the mix.
Winners will be announced on Thursday 19 November at Manchester Hall, so fingers crossed. We’ll let you know how we get on in the next edition.
If we’ve ever made your phones ring, filled a table or sent a report filled with green, this one’s as much yours as ours. Thank you for trusting us with your campaigns.
As always, none of this happens without the brands who trust us with their campaigns. Thank you.
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✅ You've Been Opted In
Google and Meta have both started switching features on by default, and they make a real difference to what your guests see.
🏷️ Your website offers can now appear in your Google ads
Google now scans your website for offers and deals and can add them to your ads automatically. That’s great when it picks up the right one. Less great when it shows last month’s bottomless brunch deal, or a “kids eat free” offer without the Monday to Thursday small print.
The fix starts with your website, because that’s where Google is looking.
Our advice:
- Take down expired offers as soon as they end, including banners, pop-ups and old landing pages.
- Keep the terms next to the offer. If it’s midweek only or excludes certain venues, say so clearly on the page.
- Tell us what’s coming up. If we know your festive offers and dates in advance, we can add them to your ads ourselves, worded the way you want, instead of leaving it to Google.
📱 Your Meta ads may open inside Facebook and Instagram
From 28 October, Meta is switching on a feature that can show people an in-app product view when they tap your ad, instead of sending them straight to your website.
It might suit retail, but for venues the aim is usually getting someone to your booking page as fast as possible, without an extra stop inside the app. Meta says businesses saw 3% more conversions on average with it switched on, but we’re reviewing this across every account we manage and switching it off where it would slow down bookings.
Two changes, but what do they mean? The platforms are moving fast, and small settings can have a big knock-on effect on your bookings. If you're not sure whether any of these affect your venues, we'll check for you.
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⚙️ A Lighter Way to Tag
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Google Tag Manager has a new optional setup called the Optimized Tagging Experience, and if you’re tidying up tracking before Christmas, it’s worth knowing about.
In short, GTM can now send data to Google Analytics and Google Ads directly, without loading extra Google tag code on top. Shared settings that used to live in the Google tag move into the GTM container instead. Fewer scripts on the page can mean a slightly lighter site, though how much depends on everything else your site loads.
The catch: those shared settings then apply to your Google Ads tags as well as Analytics, so a change made for one can quietly affect the other. Migrating isn’t automatic, and the changes land in a workspace for testing before anything goes live.
Our advice: don’t switch it on the week before your festive budgets go up. Test it, check your booking conversions still fire, then publish.
Want us to look over your GTM setup? Get in touch.
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🎨 Meta is now scoring how varied your ads are
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Meta now rates every set of ads Low, Medium or High based on how different they look and feel from one another. If your ads look alike, Meta treats them as one, so twenty shots of the same burger count as a single idea.
The brands winning on Meta right now are the ones giving the algorithm genuinely different ideas to work with. That’s where you come in, because the best content comes from your venues. When you send us content, aim for variety:
- Different formats: short videos, photos, behind-the-scenes clips, quick phone footage from a busy Friday.
- Different people: your guests, your team, your chefs, not just the food.
- Different occasions: a birthday, a date night, a team night out, a lazy Sunday brunch.
- Different moods: fun, cosy, buzzy, indulgent.
You don’t need a big shoot. A month of good phone footage from your team often beats one polished day of photography.
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