2012 AWNY Career Conference

This weekend I attended the Advertising Women of New York (AWNY) Career Conference at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. This conference is an opportunity for students to gain more information about the industry of advertising and the many different areas in it. The two-day conference included agency visits, keynote speakers, clinics and workshops. Even though this was my second year attending the annual conference that did not prevent me from learning a lot!

We kicked off the conference with two agency visits. The first was to the Ithaca alumni packed agency G2. There we got to ask questions to the many alumni and get a tour of the different departments in the agency. While walking around the agency, I couldn’t help but find many parallels between G2 and McGarrah Jessee. After, we headed over to McCann NY and met an IC grad who’s an account manager there who gave us a presentation about the company. I found a connection to McCann’s ideology of “The Truth Well Told”. Essentially during the strategy period they reveal both a consumer truth and brand truth and build campaigns based on these two concepts. These truths can be both negative or positive. As I learned while taking Advertising Copywriting and Art Direction at school, great campaigns possess a type of human truth that connects to your consumer. When the target audience sees your ad they should feel some type of a emotional connection.

The keynote address on Saturday morning by Mary Baglivo, CEO of the Americas at Saatchi & Saatchi, contained a ton of great advice and motivation. She particularly stressed that everyone who plays a role in advertising must be creative in some way. This includes taking data and information and using empathy and creativity to create a relationship between brands and consumers, creating Lovemarks. It’s not just about getting consumers to like your brand but getting them to love and respect your brand.

Saturday afternoon brought some really great workshops. I first attended a workshop about interactive/digital/emerging media. At first I thought the session was just gonna be a promotion for the company that the presenters worked at, iD Media, but it soon turned into a very educational experience as they delved into new areas of emerging media. They stressed that digital media strategists must “be on top of a trend”. They have to bring ideas to their clients and not have their clients bringing them ideas they saw competitors doing. They also discussed the use of SMS call to actions. This basically calls the audience to text vs. sending them to the company website, Facebook page or a microsite. SMS call to actions sees a 3.7 times greater response than sending viewers to a website. Using SMS also gives companies a ton of information about those who text including their phone number, area code, the type of phone they use, and provider. They can use this information to form a database and use for future SMS promotions. An example of this that I’ve experience is a promotion my mall did using SMS. Since the original promotion I have received numerous texts regarding different events and sales taking place. Yesterday I got a text informing that Santa has arrive at the mall.

The next workshop I attended was presented by Suzanne Powers, the VP/Global Strategy Officer for Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B) on account planning/strategy. This was by far my favorite workshop because it further convinced me that account planning is the area I want to pursue in advertising. She walked us through what account planning is and the methodology behind CP+B’s account planning. Some key takeaways were:

• “Always know your audience”
• Account planners “Make it up as they go along”
• “Speak in human speak”
• Account planners are curious and daring
• “Find the right questions rather than the right answers”
• Account planners seek truth, insight and relevancy
• Account planners spend more time ask WHY? rather than what. 

She spoke about how CP+B planners searched for the cultural tensions found around a brand. Based on this tension they design a strategy that taps a human emotion to relieve this tension. After explaining the CP+B process we got to try it out.

My last workshop was on account management and featured a panel of account executives, supervisors, brand managers, etc. from McGarry Bowen, MRM and Digo. Even though my interest in account management is fading, I gained a very interesting perspective from this panel and could compare it to my experience this summer as an account management intern. One things I learned about McGarry Bowen is that they separate their account manager not only by the clients they serve but also based on the medium they produce work for. For example, account mangers either work on traditional (print, tv, radio, out of home) or non-traditional (digital, experiential, interactive, social). I was a little turned off by this division because it almost pigeonholes their employees even though it also specializes them. It could be a double edged sword for both the employer and employees. 3 of the panelists had Verizon as their client at 2 different agencies. For some reason I always thought that a brand selects one agency and that is it. I always thought that a brand may choose to have another agency, like a specific digital agency, because they specialized in that type of medium. Well, during this session I learned that large company brands often will hire different agencies to also maintain a healthy level of competition. These brands feel it is better to have their work scattered to many agencies so they have some pressure on their current agencies and don’t have to start from scratch if they need to leave one of them.

Overall I had a great experience at AWNY this year. I made a bunch of connections and look forward to applying what I learned in the future whether that is right now at school or at internships.