Festival Day 1 (Sunday 6/19)

Day one of the festival finally arrived! I was most excited about the UM, L’Oreal, & BMW seminar and also the imc^2 seminar. These seminars where not as good as I thought they would be, and I actually was more engaged in both of the other seminars I saw. The first seminar I went to this morning was goviral with Jimmy Maymann, the executive chairman, and Martin Lindstrom, a brand expert/author. The title was “The Long Idea” and was all about how to make your brand last. They used soccer as a metaphor and talked about the media revolution of the World Cup.  They shared a stat from 2001 that 15% of what we talk about is linked to brands. Now, in 2011, 37% of what we talk about is brands.  I found this very interesting that we are in a world that is continuing to put more and more focus on brands.  In fact, they discussed how brands are so important that about 60% of most powerful brands share the same activation in the brain as a person’s religion. They gave an example of a powerful brand passing the “smash test.” Coca-Cola is considered a powerful brand because you can smash the bottle and pick up a piece and still know that it is a Coke bottle. This was interesting to me because it is so true. Their 1:9:90 study was also amazing because it illustrates that one person has an influence on 100 people through word of mouth. I’ve always thought that word of mouth advertising for a business is the most effective as well as the cheapest way. They ended their presentation by talking about how our world is increasingly becoming a world of demand and how to build momentum online. After that seminar we met with USA Today’s Susan Lily which was great to hear what the U.S. does before and during the festival. I thought it was interesting what she had to say about picking judges and trying to find eligible women in the field. I agreed with her view on how women have other priorities besides work so it is hard for them to get to those high level positions. UM, L’Oreal, & BMW was about new media and marketing technologies and the positive impact technology has on marketing. I was not very impressed with this seminar and did not really like the panel set up. Thenetworkone seminar was very interesting and funny. They talked about the importance of independent companies over big companies. I had no idea how many companies are independent. One of the speakers was Ali Ali from Egypt, and he was so interesting to listen to. He talked about what to do when clients are not spending money like during the Egypt revolution. One quote I found very interesting is “If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got.” The imc^2 “Friends with Benefits” seminar with Nick Jonas was not what I expected. It was cool to see Nick Jonas but the seminar wasn’t really focused on relationship building like I thought it would be. I'm excited for what the rest of the week has in store!