Amsterdam, a little rain, 11 hours of workshops and seminars with some of the biggest advertising names in Europe, 10 minute brakes, running between classes, half an hour for a fast meal = the perfect environment for a little ad-addict like me !
If I had to pick, I’d say my favorite two were : Decoding Email Marketing and The Hardest-Working Swedes in the Business give You a Peek behind the Scenes.
Leave me alone Harry and hold my hand Larry!
The first focused upon the importance of creating a proper direct marketing content and concept for the online environment. Besides the well known advice that any direct marketer gives : NO SPAM, Michael Leander ( FEDMA’s CEO) showed us solutions to avoid it. He started by talking about “one to one marketing” and proved how the best 2% marketers ( “ motor people”) manage to stay on top. According to him, the three main considerations a successful direct marketer should always remember are : Create an experience for the consumer, Engage your target and Tell the target exactly what you want him to do. At the last one , he told us about his own philosophy regarding consumer’s behavior: Leave me alone Harry and hold my hand Larry- Harry is the consumer that takes his own decisions and prefers to explore on his own the platform or content, and Larry is the one that needs to be given exact directions. Michael Lander also emphasized upon the importance of using multiple tools for the online direct communication like newsletters, offers and promotions , and alerts. The idea is that even if you lose one, you still have two left. An other interesting part of the workshop was a case study he showed us about an opera that made a little experiment to analyse the target’s behavior : they made two Stage Passes, the first had four types of discounts and was called ( Stage Pass) and the other one had 5 extra discounts and was called Stage Pass +. After six months, they realized that even if, both were free, to everyone’s surprise, 60% chose the pass with less options. Another tip we got, was to include the preview sample at a newsletter subscription in order to give the target the opportunity to “touch” the product before “buying” it.
5 Ad-Gurus in one small room!
This was a dream came true! In this workshop I met 5 people that I have read about , admired and never thought I would get to know or see so close. Sweden has some of the best advertising people in Europe.
The first were the B-Reel guys : Oscar Tillman and Lars Bjurman- you might remember them as the ones who did Hotel 626, the first advertgame built on the concept of interactive film. ( Doritos Campaign). They proved one again that creativity and innovation have no limits with three of their newest campaigns
Axe
Talk Talk Brightdancing
Asylum 626
Then came ACNE Digital : with Klas Jonsson and Max Ahlban. They had a very interesting way of structuring their presentation, they chose to explain us the rules of interactive storytelling using their campaigns as an argument.
- Let the user be part of the story : Change perspectives at Saab Campaign
- Let the user be the story : The Lynx Roar
- Let the user create the story : BBC Blast Get Creative
Also, a quote that stick to me was what they said regarding to the future of storytelling and advertising : “ The next step forward is to take a step back and understand the past and presenting order to create the future.
The last was world known North’s Kingdom CEO: David Erikson who presented his last campaign for Germany’s National football team : A graphic novel game – Adidas
All in all, I got to run to take some pictures with Amsterdam’s ginger bread like .
buildings that seem to be sinking in the water.
The ad-addict always on a hurry: Nico (Nicoleta Ivascu)