We had a great time at The Art of Marketing Conference today here in Montreal at the Palais des Congres. Definitely some real inspiring and enlightening stuff being shared by the likes of Seth Godin, Avinash Kaushik, Max Lenderman and friends.
It’s amazing the things you take for granted before you actually see or meet a person live.
Seth was everything I’d built him up to be and more. It would seem as though he lives and breathes (and has done for quite some time) what he preaches and has quite the storied career that include stints at Yahoo!, the authoring of several books, speaking, inventing and failing.
Avinash however kind of caught me off guard. Since the majority (all) of my interactions with him take place via his blog or his Twitter feed, I can tell you I would have never expected him to be so loud, sometimes vulgar, and funny. Because of his ancestral background and renowned expertise in the field of analytics I assumed he’d be timid, on the quiet side, and very calculated – in speech and delivery. I stereotyped. Bad on me. Good on buddy.
For sure it’s painstaking going through his 3000 word blog posts, and rarely do I make it all the way through without either being distracted and/or lost entirely. Hearing him speak and making that real world connection I hope will push me to read on and absorb. Dude is smart. Talk about the Long Tail of analytics. It’s unreal what can be measured using free tools and the Help button to set up the segmenting you need to be doing to analyze and improve…or die. LOL.
Perhaps one of the more people-sensitive presentations was that one given by Max Lenderman. A lot of these guys run through their same schtick at these things and go through the motions, wrapping up the delivery a little bit differently than they might have a month ago or a year ago. I’m not saying the stuff is crap – far from it – just that it’s hard to be so fresh, so cutting edge EVERY TIME you speak if you’re booking gigs 2-3 times a week and speaking to the same type of audience who’ve come to hear exactly what it is you’re going to say – even if it’s the 10th time this month. Max’ approach was a little different in that he brought a bit more of the living and breathing and emotion into the branding and advertising and marketing we know so well. Places, photos, stories and videos based on his travel and obligations all tying in to his master plan towards marketing success – Authenticity – Experience – Big-Think (cool name but Big Balls would have been way better) – and GOODNESS.
Photo taken from dirtybutton.com. You can visit their site for some other ballsy pix.
He related a story telling of an ad agency who were acknowledged at Cannes for a billboard they’d handled that was installed near a slum in Johannesburg. The ad was doing it’s thing – garnering people’s attention – but for all of the RIGHT reasons. Creative types should be charged with ways to make themselves or their clients money by doing the GOODNESS. Not once in a while on one billboard in one little town – but in many, and it must extend beyond the billboard. Procter & Gamble are doing this with things as simple as washers and dryers. It’s amazing how helping people and being nice actually build brand loyalty. Oftentimes 10x stronger than anything a radio ad or tv spot could achieve. This guy I think is on the right track. Makes sense he’s working at one of the biggest agencies in North America I guess…hahaa..
As organizers of the Social Media Breakfast Montreal we had the opportunity to not only partake in the event (thanks Rick Del Rosso of The Art of Productions), but give 4 tickets away via a draw held at our 4th #SMBMTL installment, as well as a contest we ran on our LinkedIn group that asked members to call out and vote for the “worst” websites in Montreal.
The lucky winners were Luis London Gomez of KAI Design and Communication, Jennifer Cook catsinthebag.com, Marc Snyder and Caroline Cloutier. Thanks all for taking part in the breakfasts and the online contest. Hopefully the involvement in our next contest will see more of the 180 strong jump in. We also ran into friends and #SMBMTL speaker alum Adele McAlear and Mark Goren taking in the show – it was more of a show than your run-of-the-mill conference.
One of our winners, Luis London Gomez, also helped in providing what served as my pick-me-up/kick-in-the-butt of the day. As it turns out, Luis reads our blog. Yes, the same blog where on several occasions over the past few months I’ve claimed I’d make an effort to write more…The same blog where I proclaimed I’d been tearing through books and was about to post a slew of book reviews that might help some of our readers pick what to read next (whose number I guess I’ve been doubting)….but didn’t. Well, Luis called me out on it. And I got excited. So here I am at 2am telling you and the rest of the world. I couldn’t be happier. Thanks Luis. I’ll make a point to bang off those book reviews – not just for you, but also for the other guy/girl from who posted a comment on another post.
Thanks to anyone else taking the time to read my thoughts. It means a lot.
BTW, does anyone know how old Andy Nulman is? From the back he looked younger at the conference than he did on that appearance of ChaBaDa ten years ago….
