Last week I was fortunate enough to spend two days at the IMM09: International Comms Planning in a Changing and Uncertain World. As the director of a start up in social media I’m certainly au fait with uncertainty and change – but I wasn’t sure what value I was going to be able to add to what is essentially a training camp for junior execs from media agencies.
My involvement covered three events. I was in the audience for a number of the presentations, I was a part of a panel that discussed the future of media agencies (more on that later) and I was a mentor for the competition brief – essentialy Strictly Come Dancing meets Big Brother in a media agency setting with a dash of Fight Club. And worth adding that all of this was taking place in a hotel that that prompted an unsettling first impression of The Shining. Okay the snow and the financial climate didn’t help but there was a certain feeling of faded glory and impending doom that was extremely apt for the whole event and the competition brief.
I hope I was able to conttribute something in my role as mentor but mostly I think (as you usually do) I got more out of it – than I put in. The brief competition teams were made up of a range of nationalities and roles within different European media agencies and they were given 18 hrs to crack a brief to promote Iceland the country. There were lots of really interesting ideas, strategies and tactics presented at the final pitches but for me three things stood out;
- Iceland is actually quite an affordable and interesting option for a holiday (so they all succeeded on some level)
- Ideas matter. And if you can’t quickly and coherently articulate your idea you will lose your audience and struggle to re-gain them
- That’s actually quite hard to do; both the creation and the communication of good ideas requires a lot of preparation, practice and focus. And its vital – because no matter how efficient your marketing spend ROI – if it lacks the power of an idea behind it – you’ve got little chance of selling it in – to either the client – or more importantly the final audience – their customers.
