Well I was very glad that I made it over to Navy Pier in time this morning to hear Jim McCafferty's session on day two of the PromoLive Promotional Marketing Event. I was however a few minutes late and heard that I just missed the beach balls being bounced around the room. Jim was very entertaining and did get the group pumped up for the day with his "Powering Up Your Creative" presentation that he gave without the use of a PowerPoint!
Jim, President and CEO of JMP Creative, gave us this advice to help increase our creativity..."think inside another box, not out of the box". He gave us some tools as well as examples of what he uses to help his team come up with great ideas. Here's a few of them:
- IdeaFisher - Software program designed to speed up the creative process by working on principles of association and memory retrieval.
- Masterwriter - Songwriting software that helps with rhyming components and ideal for creating taglines.
- Handwrite the objective on a piece of paper 3x's before you start any ideation session.
- Collect images of things that are cool, unique and unusual and archive them into categories. Put them on your iPod to review anywhere, anytime.
- Do the same for really cool videos and keep track of their links.
Jim shared with us many images that he's collected to help get our creative juices going. In summary he advised us to really look at projects in a totally different way in order to get people talking about them and to help stay competitive today.
We were treated to more of Jim later in the afternoon when he shared with us his "Virtual Slide Show" which consisted of some very famous viral video campaigns, including a look again at Eepybird and the Diet Coke/Mentos fountain experiment. This session also included a brief Viral Program 101 course which I'll have to write about in it's own post. Jim really did give us all some great take-ways for the day. As they say, if you learn one or two things and walk away with one good idea, then the conference was worth the time and money.
Another session I really enjoyed was called Social Media: Evolution to Execution which was a panel comprised of four unique marketers each with their own blog. Again I'll have to devote a separate post to this session since it really crystallized everything that I've learned sine I've started blogging. For now I just have to share the story Herb Sawyer,the panel moderator from Carmichael Lynch Spong, told us about his mom from Iowa that "really scares him sometimes". Here's a women he told us that can't program her own VCR, but does goes online occasionally using a dial-up connection. She commented on a blog not knowing that "Give us your thoughts here" had entered her in the blogosphere.
I ended the day listening some more to Daniel Levine, founder of Avant-Guide, talk about "The 5 Rules of Cool" and showing us some great examples of brands that innovated to be cool. I got a chance to chat with him after the session since it was the last one of the conference and asked him about what he sees as the top cultural trends that marketers should be watching for today. More to come on this as well.
So I'm really interested in hearing from those of you that attended to hear your thoughts about the event. I got a chance to speak to several people during the breaks and I heard many different comments both positives and negatives. I can say that the conference was lacking in the presence of the big name brands that normally attract attendees as well as sponsors. But what it lacked there I think it made it up by having experts from various agencies and service providers who gave some very practical, open and honest advice and were very accessible to speak with throughout the event.
I'll continue to post on this event and provide more details. I would love to hear from those that attended as well as those that didn't who may have some questions or may be able to provide additional input to these topics. Thanks to all who put on the event as well as those that shared their thoughts and experiences with us.
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