PROMO Live Welcomes Daniel Levine From Avant-Guide

PROMOLive begins this Monday, Sept. 17 and runs through Wednesday, Sept. 19th again being held at the Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. This is PROMO Magazine's annual Promotional Marketing Event for Brand and Agency Marketers which I wrote about in this post last week and that I'll be attending as a guest blogger!

Beginning first thing Tuesday morning when I arrive at Midway Airport I'm going to head right over to the Navy Pier in order to catch Daniel Levine, Executive Director of Avant-Guide Institute. He'll be opening up the first session of the conference with "PROMO Aloud: The Innovation Interviews". They describe this session as giving us an "exhilarating look forward to the most fascinating and profitable trends heading our way." Daniel will be questioning before our live audience some of this year’s leading-edge creative thinkers about major cultural developments driving promotional marketing into the next decade.

So I checked out Avant-Guide's website to learn more about Mr. Levine. It says that he's a Conference Speaker, Global Trends Consultant and a TV and Radio Guest. A quote from CNN says: "Daniel Levine is the ultimate guru of cool.... He has a remarkable ability to distill cool to its essence and articulate it in a way we can all benefit from." Now that's not the way we typically describe us marketers, although some us would like to be!

The site says that Daniel's "Tomorrow Today" speaker session is "brimming with to-the-point examples of where culture and business are headed. This one-of-a-kind presentation reveals the latest international developments in your own industry, as well as the newest advances in other industries that will substantially impact your businesses."

Daniel's done work with a wide range of businesses such as MasterCard, Samsonite, HBO, NBC, Saatchi and Saatchi and Deutsche Telekom AG. He's the founder of Avant-Guide, which claims to be the leading resource for style. They are in the process of assembling an influential community of consumers along with a select network of destinations, merchants and service providers that caters to them. Their seminal product, the highly-acclaimed Avant-Guide city series, is one of the fastest-growing guidebooks in North America and Europe. They also have the Global Trends Blog that welcomes you to the world of Avant-Guide and includes an interview with Michael Stipe, from R.E.M., one of my all-time favorite bands.

So, I'm really looking forward to Daniel's session Tuesday morning. I'm going to try my best to catch up with him while at the conference and ask him a few questions regarding where he sees our industry heading. If you have something specific that you'd like me to ask him please let me know. You can also send Daniel an email directly off the PROMOLive Microsite where he's listed under speakers and where he's posted the Michael Stipe interview in the PROMOLive blog as well.  And yes, I've been added to the Microsite as a Conference Blogger along with access to post on their blog with a link back to this blog. So, I hope to get the conversation going one way or another.