I have returned from the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) conference in Austin, USA and, as last year, I attended some great sessions and met interesting people. This year I was also speaking at the conference.
With the recession beginning to affect agency businesses I sought out those sessions that might be useful learning and training tools for you, the readers of Creative Agency Secrets. Most of you run or work in creative agencies and will be considering how to plan for your future business development, growth and survival. I hope that some of these posts will be useful reading over your Easter holiday.
Firstly – the panel I spoke on was called My boss doesn't get it: championing social media to 'the Man'. With well-known B2B blogger, Peter Kim and the Small World Labs team we had a good discussion including taking questions by Twitter! The panel is
summarised by several bloggers.
If you have an interest in Advertising and Branding – read about how Alex Bogusky from Crispin Porter+Bogusky is introducing new collaborative partnership business modelsto their repertoire. Chris Heuer speculated on The Future of
Advertising ng and 'hot' agency boss Pete Lerma from Click Here/The Richards Group led a great talk on
Models for agency integrationread this if you are a traditional agency adding digital teams to your offering.
British Filmmaker Jess Search of C4 Britdoc facilitated a discussion on how Brands are driving content for branded entertainment. It seems Advertiser funded programming has come to maturity.
The PR and Marketing communications world came under attack at the session "Are PR agencies a dying breed? " which was very animated – the common view was that social media is natural territory for PR folk but that we've got to get out and claim it for ourselves. Building online commmunities in B2C and B2B were covered in two separate gigs: Nerd network: building a B2B online
community
and Building your audience online .
Design and Digital businesses spoke about pitching and how to win work via the internet. This focused on some of the 'free' pitching websites in the session called Is spec
work evil? Probably the hottest argument of the conference occurred here and the debate continued in the comments on my blog post. Please join in and add your views about whether agencies should do speculative work and free pitching.
Thank you all for your time and please forward this email if it is useful for your team.
P.S. I will be going to an event tonight hosted by the Cass Business School to debate solutions to the recession for the creative industries. We'll be using the we20 method and I hope to publish the outcomes. Join us
