This week the annual London-based Financial Times Digital Media conference took place and Battenhall was able to attend to see some of the world's leading names in media, digital and business give their views on the present and future.

Bruce Daisley of Twitter's talk on how the social network has changed how business leaders, consumers and companies interact was one of the highlights. With video case studies from CEOs, cabinet ministers and citizen journalists, Bruce also gave some stat nuggets to the room, including that the average person checks their phone 150 times a day, and that users of Twitter upload collectively 400 million tweets per day. His approach was refereshing, as many speakers focused on where advertising money was being spent, as opposed to the digital trends shaping consumer media consumption, which we thought was spot on.

Another highlight was Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP, whose panel discussion and Q&A was as data-driven as you could get, citing that 34% of WPP's business is now digital, up from 0% 10 years ago. According to independent media buying statistics, digital accounts for 20% of ad money spent but consumers spend 30% of their media time on digital, so this is the big imbalance in media spend currently. He likened the big media companies to aeroplanes changing their engines mid-flight to adapt to digital, saying that smaller companies are much better equipped to be agile and navigate the digital economy.

Sorrell ended his talk saying that the changes coming up in the media environment due to digital will be as violent as those which have already taken place. That's something to look forward to.

You can watch video footage of the FT conference online here.