Sunday, June 19 2011

Goviral

The festival got off to a great start with the goviral seminar first thing this morning.  The key point to the presentation was that long term branding stems from capitalizing your product.  He used the example of selling club football shirts to keep the spirit alive, even during the off season.  An interesting turn in the presentation came when he pointed out that brands are even included in religion.  Perhaps one of the oldest brands is the cross which is 242 years old.  Brands are everything.  Amazingly 37% of what we talk about on a day-to-day basis is about brands, which also makes word-of-mouth the most powerful outlet for brand recognition.  The company he focused the most on was Nike and how they are creating campaigns that will last: writing the future.  The final take-home message was that social media and networking are two connections a brand must have in today’s market.

UM, L’Oreal, BMW

This seminar was all about entrepreneurship within a brand.  L’Oreal has started a personalization aspect to its website because there is research supporting a growing trend of purchasing beauty products online rather than in stores from 2009-2010.  L’Oreal and BMW are focusing on generating consumers from organic search and creating ads to keep them around.

Thenetworkone

This by far was my favorite seminar of the day.  Independent agencies were the topic.  The first agency speaking was Special Group.  Their focus was on growing outstanding creativity.  One of their rules is “make a lot of noise.”  The campaign for FOUR, a new TV station with a focus on comedy, featured a giant rubber duck that was placed in the harbor for one week.  The rubber duck drew massive amounts of attention and press and helped increase the ad sales by 48%. 

The second independent agency up was Muhtayzik Hoffer.  His first point was not to identify with a trend but instead to crack a brand’s code.  This agency recently created a campaign for iMeet where their main message was that creativity is too important to constrain to ad briefs.  This revolutionary way of having conference calls leads the way in joint communication.  Last but not least, the third agency was Elephant.  This agency based out of Egypt focuses on how to make the clients uncomfortable but still to do good work.  They focus on not being afraid to have fun and try new things and making sure to change the way they work at least once a year.  He emphasized that small agencies such as these make great ads.

Imc^2

Overall, I didn’t connect well with this seminar but the focus I took from it was that we are in the age of relationships.  In order to be successful in the creative market, you must be able to work and play well with others.