In the UK, that is. It is clearly a milestone on the way of the digital revolution. Anders Sundt Jensen, VP for brand communications, broke this news at the dmexco trade show this week.

Jensen said the dynamics of the UK market and the advanced consumer behaviour in the UK meant the automotive brand was already allocating half of its budget to digital, well ahead of other European territories where the company was far from allocating even 40%.

He said the key to the company's success online was the creation of specialist expertise within the company.

"We don't have normal marketers just doing online ads, or just putting our TV ads online," he said. "We have a whole department, for example, at our headquarters in Germany just doing digital marketing."

However, Jensen said one of the main problems with online marketing remained the industry's tendency towards hype.

Yep. So let's end the hype and talk about things that actually work.

As some of you might know, we at SinnerSchrader are currently involved in running JSConf.eu, the European Javascript Conference. Compared to the next conference, this is a pretty small, highly focused event. And as it turns out, it's running extremly well. That conference will take place in Berlin on November 7 & 8.

Berlin is well-known as the German capital. This fact alone makes the city by default attractive to an international audience - maybe more than Hamburg. Berlin is more than twice as big as Hamburg. Carriers like airberlin and easyjet both operate from hubs in Berlin, making it cheap and easy to get there from all over Europe.

JSconf.eu made us thinking if we also should move the next conference to Berlin. But we won't do this without asking you first - the next community that made all this possible over the last four years. It would be absolutely impossible to run the conference without all the people who invest huge amounts of their precious time and money in it.

So it's your turn to vote. Just click below. And many thanks for your support.

Please note that we certainly won't base our final decision on the result of this poll alone. But it will play an important role in the decision process.

At first, this news sounded a bit odd to me. Is there any reason why Adobe should want to buy web analytics firm Omniture? And then, I've a long history of acquisitions in mind. We are still using a tool called Hitbox that was developed by WebSideStory which got acquired by Visual Sciences which then was bought by Omniture. And now Adobe.

But ZDNet gave me the answer:

[Adobe CEO Shantanu] Narayen called the deal a "game-changer" for both Adobe and its customers because it enables advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to "realize the full value of their digital assets."

And here is the chart explaining the deal's ratio:

Does this make sense to you?

Save the date: On October 20, the first TechCrunch Munich event will take place at Sun Microsystems in Kirchheim-Heimstetten. The event kicks off at 2 pm and ends with a networking night in Munich City. The organisers expect a chock-full house with up to 150 start-ups, investors, consultants and finally Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Europe.

The initial platinum sponsor is Sun Startup Essentials which were also supporting this year's edition of the next conference. Sun Startup Essentials (SSE) was our first sponsor this year and did a really great job to help make things happen. Many thanks for that!

Although the ticket sale for TechCrunch Munich won't start before September 21, SSE member start-ups get cheaper pre-release tickets. Also on board are gate Garching Technology and Entrepreneur Center and b-neun Media & Technology Center Munich, SevenOne Interactive, Cribb and some investors.

Ticket sale will start on September 21. You might want to follow sun4startups on Twitter to get the latest news. The official hashtag is #TCMUC09.

In less than two weeks, everyone and their uncle will probably be heading to Cologne for the first dmexco (Sep 23/24). It's the successor of the late OMD, a Düsseldorf-based trade show. I think of both as kind of Web 1.0 events. But that's not the reason I won't make it to Cologne.

The reason is PICNIC, a pretty nice conference and event that takes place in Amsterdam every September, this year from the 23rd to the 25th. And since I don't yet mastered the art of bi-location, I had to opt for one of both events. So Mark Pohlmann who heads our Advisory Board will be in Cologne and I will travel to Amsterdam.

And what's best - you can, too! I've one spare full conference ticket to share. Please leave a comment (don't forget to add a mail address) and name a reason why to attend PICNIC.

And while we are at it, check out the brilliant lineup filled with names like Nicholas Negroponte and Niklas Zennström.

Wayne Arnold who set up marketing agency Profero in 1998 has a nice piece in AdAge about the present and future of agencies. That's a topic of interest for everyone who works for such a beast (like me).

Wayne cites Nicholas Negroponte, former chair of MIT's Media Lab (who will give a keynote speech at PICNIC two weeks from now). Ten years ago, Nicholas stated that any company that describes itself as an "agency" is doomed. Wayne agrees and proposes agencies to become what he calls agents of change. To Wayne, this means looking at "business issues".

So far, so good. Things are getting interesting when he gets to the point (emphasis added):

The most significant difference between the ideas that transformed businesses in the past and those that will in the future is digital -- the biggest single agent of change today, tomorrow and for the foreseeable future. Why? Because digital is fundamentally bringing companies' core values and products closer to their consumers in both positive and negative ways like never before.

Agents of change embrace the digital revolution. Ours is not the first industry to get turned inside out -- the transformation of the music business being one of the most significant and well documented -- but out of adversity comes opportunity. Digital impacts everything, from sales and marketing to distribution to customer service, and I believe it's the biggest single lever agencies can use to create business changing ideas and regain credibility as creative business partners.

We talk to clients about how they should change their structures, align with their value, fulfill their promises -- even change their premises. And we tell them they have to change how they think about communications and media, too.

And that's what's so exciting at the moment. The world is turning upside down, creating amazing opportunities for those nimble enough or those who have the vision to change. These companies will go back to being creative business partners to clients once again.

In 2008, we ran the next conference under the motto "get realtime". By hindsight, this seems a bit premature now, as the real-time web is just getting steam. Loïc Le Meur even runs his excellent LeWeb conference with "The Real-Time Web" as the theme this year - a full one and a half years later then next08.

ReadWriteWeb has just published a Primer on the real-time web in three parts (one, two and three, via), written by Ken Fromm. He is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Vivid Studios, one of the first interactive agencies, and Loomia, a recommendation, discovery, and personalisation company.

Ken's Primer is way Twitter-centric in my opinion, but hey - Twitter is the cool kid on the block real-time web. What really has changed since the advent of Twitter in the mass-market, is speed.

Years ago, pages might have been crawled by search engines daily. With the advent of RSS, new posts would flow through the system within hours. With Twitter, the flow is propagated from company to company to user in real time.

If you are interested in the real-time web, you definitely should take some time, shut down Twitter and mail and read his piece.

Yesterday after business hours, I got mail from Headshift, announcing that they joined forces with (i.e. they got acquired by) the Dachis Group of ex-Razorfish founder Jeff Dachis (not to be confused with Jeff Jarvis). This was thrilling news for me, as I just got to know Lee Bryant, one of the Headshift founders.

First, he impressed me with a short talk at Lift Conference in Geneve this year. There he laconically told the audience that the 20th century was wrong. Second, he landed another hit at our own next conference in May, this time speaking about user-driven companies. And third, Lee showed up at reboot11 in Copenhagen again (no video of his talk, but a short interview).

With Headshift joining Dachis Group, Lee and his team now want to engage their second stage rockets, as he puts it on the company blog.

Leaving behind the niche world of enterprise 2.0, we are ready to work with businesses at a senior level to run change programmes aimed at bringing their processes, internal IT and communications into the Twenty-First Century. It has never been cheaper or easier to collaborate online. It has never been easier to harness people power to drive business performance. It has never been easier to engage with customers and business partners. Yet, as we know, most companies have come to accept an overly bureaucratic, process-heavy high-cost model of doing business as the norm. They need credible partners who can operate across technology, organisational design and business analysis to help meet this challenge, not just evangelists or technology vendors. That's our role.

Mercedes Bunz, who also appeared on stage at this year's next conference, has a short Guardian piece that sums things up precisely:

In the past the internet was driven by companies communicating with an abstract user. When social platforms for private communication evolved, most firms suddenly found themselves needing to catch up - that is, in the position of second-wave adopters. The forming of the Dachis group and the acquisition of Headshift can be read as a sign that the facebookification of business has begun.

Take your chance and get a next10 ticket with 50% off today! The next conference 2010 is still eight months away, but the first 50 participants are already registered. As of now, we have 14 tickets for friends left, for 390 Euro (ex VAT) each, so don't hesitate to register now!

Special offer: next10 + Community & Marketing 2.0 SUMMIT

Get two conferences with one single ticket! Register now for next10 on May 4 & 5, 2010 and Community & Marketing 2.0 SUMMIT on September 16 & 17, 2009 for the special price of 990 Euro (ex VAT).