THE Marketing Event 2018: Session Descriptions
KEYNOTE
“The Red Thread: How to find and tell the story of ideas”
At the heart of marketing lies one seemingly elusive goal: how do we get people to love our ideas as much as we do? The problem is they…don’t, at least not yet. The even bigger problem? The way we go about trying to convince them usually accomplishes the exact opposite. Thankfully, there’s a surprisingly simple answer, and it lies in how we came up with the idea in the first place. Join keynote speaker Tamsen Webster as she combines the lessons of 20 years as brand marketer, four years as a TEDx Executive Producer, and 13 years moonlighting as a Weight Watchers leader into a powerful process for finding and telling the story of your ideas.
Tamsen Webster
Principal, Tamsen Webster
BREAKOUT SESSIONS
Taking the Best Shot at your Stories
You have multiple stories up your proverbial marketing sleeve, but do you have the right visuals to tell compelling and engaging stories? Before you roll the cameras and yell “action!”, it’s essential to invest in an intelligent visual strategy. Strong imagery is the linchpin of proposals, awards, press, social media, and websites. And the right combination of still images, text, and film can tell your stories in powerful ways that are simple and understandable. For example, with good visuals, you can explain the experience of a patient admitted to the hospital that you just finished. You can demonstrate your ability to complete a building that looks just like the original rendering, despite budget constraints. You can highlight the custom details of your high-performance façade. Moving images can describe how the sequence of spaces unfolds as a visitor walks through a building in a way that you can’t do in words, or show how your building design naturally evolves from its particular site.
Tami Hausman
Founder & Principal, Hausman LLC
Brad Feinknopf
Founder & Principal, Feinknopf
Caroline Noirjean
Senior Graphic Designer, Grimshaw
The Value of a Clean Shirt
Today’s world is fast, exhilarating and immediate, with visual stimulation at our fingertips and a visual cacophony as far as the eye can see. Communication races at us from every possible direction and platform. So how does a firm conquer the noise and distinguish itself?
Narrative storytelling is a basic building block with proven results. But visual storytelling, like a clean shirt, strengthens, shapes, focuses, and reinforces that narrative. Chris and Jess will use visual examples and a re-branding case study to illustrate simple graphic fundamentals that dramatically shape, support and give voice to a company’s brand. Investment in graphic design can propel a company out of the visual noise and into the spotlight.
Chris Calori
Principal, Entro - CVE Design
Jessica Schrader
Senior Manager, Entro - CVE Design
From Concept to Reality: Visual Storytelling in the Business World
Maria van Vlodrop will share how she used visual storytelling to launch MvVO ART and AD ART SHOW, moving rapidly from concept to reality by creating a message that continues to resonate with her targeted audience. The MvVO ART mandate connects art & commerce, aligning brands & businesses with the powerful voice of art & artists. The kind of storytelling is a natural strategy for architects, builders, and designers as they venture into marketing services in a competitive environment. The presentation will focus on how to communicate an exciting and engaging original message.
Maria van Vlodrop
Founder and CEO, MvVO ART
Authentic Conversations in the Age of AI
The rise of voice search, chatbots, virtual assistants, robots and IOT sensors is changing the very nature of conversations between customers and brands. These new technologies allow marketers to scale interactions across all phases of a customer lifecycle – from initial purchase to product use and advocacy. It’s an exciting time, but also one of uncertainty. This session explores the use AI driven technologies to develop scalable, emotional connections with buyers by balancing the tension between machine intelligence and human interaction. Attendees will learn how to develop marketing that is MORE human as a result of modern marketing technology. We will dispel common myths that hold us back from embracing essential technology and learn how to think about technology as an authenticity tool.
Samantha Stone
Founder, CMO, The Marketing Advisory Network
How Color & Design Trends Tell the Story of our Times… From Frank Lloyd Wright to Today
This is the story of Frank Lloyd Wright – a true American icon, highly influential architectural master and all-around modern dreamer. It highlights the professional life of Wright, his influence on and achievements in modern design, and his body of work resulting from his time at Taliesin (West) with special focus on the color palette developed for Taliesin (West). In addition, we will review how color preference is subjective but not random. There are influencers from our earliest memories, our demographic generation, current societal events that create color preferences. We will look at how we filter through the millions of colors to arrive at our forecasted colors and how and why authentic, nature-derived palettes, like Wright’s, still resonate today with customers.
Dee Schlotter
Sr. Color Marketing Manager, PPG
Decoding Your Data DNA: Best Practices for Customer Acquisition
Making full use of data captured by website and marketing channels is the most efficient, cost-effective way to boost acquisition rates while controlling costs. Learn how to use your data to better understand your clients, create and connect with profitable audience segments, identify the best type of delivery method for content marketing, objectively assess campaign performance and control costs. We will review a NYC commercial construction firm case study highlighting replicable growth techniques and a thorough explanation of data types and their relevance to the client acquisition and retention process. An overview of data capture essentials, analysis techniques, and data driven decision making makes it possible for attendees to immediately begin realizing more value from analytics reports.
Jennifer Shaheen
President & CEO, Technology Therapy Group
Connecting the Analytical (and ROI) Dots with Storytelling
Today’s marketer has more data and analytics at their fingertips than ever before. Nearly every aspect of modern marketing—from website activity, to email click-through rates, video views to social media engagement—can now be tracked online in real-time. While both marketers and firm leadership are often besieged with data and desperate for meaning, data storytelling can help to connect the dots to what really matters. In this session, we’ll take a closer look at the relationship between digital data and the stories that are found behind the numbers. We’ll explore how marketers can more effectively sift through analytics to uncover powerful stories that provide change-driving insights and validate the online activities of the marketing team.
Tim Asimos
VP/Director, Circle S Studio
Branding is a Verb: Teaching Internal Teams to be Active Brand Storytellers
Keeping a company’s brand active means paying attention to how it speaks, looks and acts over a lifetime. Brand Strategists often work with key decision-makers within a company to increase brand knowledge among internal teams, helping them develop their voice as brand advocates and activists. In this workshop, we will explore the art and science of maintaining the integrity of a service company’s brand, identifying critical junctures in the lifetime of a brand and addressing how to initiate an internal brand activation campaign that builds brand advocates from within.
Brandi Knox
Principal, Knox Design Strategy
CLOSING SESSION
Big Data? But I Still Suck at Little Data
While many companies struggle to wrap their arms around emerging trends like Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and ChatBots they may be missing a more immediate opportunity – Little Data. We’ll explore the state of Big Data and talk about why it goes hand in hand with effective Little Data execution. Using case studies and examples we’ll look at where marketing is headed. We’ll also talk about some of the things marketers should be worried about today.
Dean Shaw
Customer Experience Analytic Program Manager, SAS