FESTIVAL – DAY ONE

 

When we arrived this morning to the Young Lions section, I thought it resembled a daycare center; only it was perfectly designed to please the sprawling group of 20something year olds in attendance.  15 minutes, two red bulls, one smoothie, and six drawings later, I was more than ready and excited to start my day.

After our meeting with Susan from USA Today (which was pleasant and informative), I made my way to my very first seminar of the festival: Goviral: The Long Idea with Jimmy Maymann and Martin Lindstrom.  Having taking a Rhetoric and Pop Culture class this past, I have some understanding of how deeply brands permeate our conscious and subconscious thoughts.  However, these two presented brands as a religion.  Before people deemed the speakers heretic, they explained our idolatry of brands.  From their research, the “ten commandments of religion” are as follows: rituals, symbols, sensory appeal, emotion, mystery, power, storytelling, belonging, grandeur, and enemy.  Sound familiar?  In addition to explaining how we are probably all polygamists (brands and religion), they explained how our  “21^st Century Evangelism” is a three fold process including first production, publication, and then distribution.  Their seminar was particularly enjoyable because their studies so controversial and in depth. 

The next seminar I attended was Um, L’Oreal, and BMW.  While the panel was obviously stacked with intelligence and expertise, I did not find it incredibly thought provoking.  I did however enjoy the L’Oreal rep’s description of the importance of personalization and connection with a client.  They market their product (beauty products) on a very personal level: hair color, eye shape, skin tone, etc

Following Um, L’Oreal and BMW group was the presentation led by TheNetworkOne.  Consisting of only independent companies, this was my favorite seminar of the day by FAR.  Each presentation made me laugh, think, and more thoroughly understanding the process of creative advertising.  The speaker from “Special Group” emphasized the idea that when working on a campaign that, “if makes you nervous, that’s good”.  Half of this business is taking risks, pushing boundaries, and exploring new horizons – never follow the trend, set the next one. The others echoed his belief that advertising is a mixture of creativity and fear.  These three speakers instructed us to “make noise”, “if you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got”, and finally, “good is the enemy of great, and great is what matters.”  This last idea is quite motivational: good enough will get you hired, content, etc – but it stands in the way of greatness.  They always gave me my new favorite commercial ever. (See link below)

This panda is my new spirit animal. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTCTfleD-pA

IMC^2  Friends With Benefits: While it started off with a bang led by an energetic man who looked remarkably like Colonel Sanders, I was unimpressed by this seminar.  Boasting big names like Nick Jonas, I was looking forward to getting some real insight but I felt the conversation was a bit scattered and focused too much on the fact that Nick was a Jonas Brother.  However, the popstar did give some good insight on how important it is to form a deep, personal connection with your consumer (of in his case, fans) and to use social media as a form of growth promotion.

I also attended Naked:  As I have a lot of writing already I will keep this short: I enjoyed the Lego commercial and the 3 C’s: community, crowd-sourcing, and co-creation were great talking points.