Day 1 of Festival

I was really anxious to see the layout of the festival. I was so surprised how nicely set up it was. I felt so legitimate. The Young Lion’s Zone was really neat and youthful. The beach bar was so cool. I did a few drawings on the white boards even though I am not artistic whatsoever. After wandering around for a few minutes we headed off to look for the seminar. The first seminar I attended “Go Viral” was with Jimmy Mayman and Martin Lindstrum. Jimmy Mayman’s topic was interesting but I was really intrigued by Martin Lindstrum. The message was discussing how to accomplish long term branding. His lecture showed that this is accomplished by using many medias. TV and print are major components but t-shirt sells, sponsorships and the web are also major players in keeping your brand mainstream. He also explained that brands are like religions. The same sociological connection in the brain is triggered when talking about a religion and talking about a strong brand. Brands are a reoccurring topic in everyday conversations with and they have increased over the years. In 2001, 15% of conversations were spent talking about brands and in 2011 that percentage rose to 37%. Mayman’s demonstration about Coca-Cola’s smashed bottle proves their desire to keep brand awareness. When a Coca-Cola bottle is smashed and broken into pieces one can pick up any piece of glass and recognize it is a Coke. I was really blown away by this. I whole-heartedly believe in the 1:9:90. It is the word of mouth theory and an experiment was done to prove this theory. A real family moved into a neighborhood and was to promote many different brands by word of mouth to the other neighbors. After the experiment was completed sales went up significantly for those brands used in the experiment. This didn’t come to any surprise to me, because I always go out and by things that people recommend to me. Usually if it is recommended it is good. What I wasn’t aware of was that during the hours of 8-10 a.m. people are more likely to react to word of mouth than in any other time of the day. Meeting with Susan Lily from USA Today was very informative and basically an overview of the festival. I was surprised as she was sharing that so few women are really represented in the advertising executive world. I always thought that because this was more of a creative job more women would be executives, but I was wrong. As Mrs. Lily discussed her role with the festival, I felt like I would be overwhelmed being in her position. She described it as a “travel agent” for delegates coming from the US. I don’t think I could be in charge of so much planning. Unexpectedly Bridget, Katie, and I were interviewed for the Lions Daily News and were on the website tonight covering the festival’s news. It was really cool. The second seminar I attended was the UM, L’Oreal and BMW. I really enjoyed the L’Oreal speaker Joanne Bradford. She spoke about how her Internet website was very personalized and that that is what appeals to an audience. For makeup products every women is looking for something that will accentuate their personal features and that is exactly what she tries to execute. With any brand I feel like this is very important and I would make sure to accomplish this if I were handling a brand. The rest of the speakers I honestly wasn’t as impressed with because they didn’t quite capture my attention. My absolute favorite seminar of the day was The Networkone. As I read the description for that seminar I wasn’t quite sure I would be interested, but I was laughing throughout each PowerPoint. They listed three guidelines to making an ad which were: If it makes you nervous- that’s good, If it looks like an ad-start again, and Make a lot of noise. Their clippings of some of their ads were absolutely hysterical. I had three favorites. The Pizza viral video, where a man repeated pizza for ten minutes, The Bawadi ad, and the Never say no to Panda ad. The Bawadi for example used prisoners in their ads to promote the Bawadi. In my opinion it was something so unexpected and bold that it turned out to be perfect. As I am thinking of a ways to promote our Nike campaign assignment I am keeping this strategy an option because I feel like it is very effective. They were so creative and off the wall which made them really stand out in my mind as great ads. Overall today was a great learning experience and I am so excited to see what the rest of the week has in store!