The Third Annual IMC Conference Makes Waves in Cape Town
Cape Town hosted the 3rd Integrated Marketing Communication conference at Crystal Towers Hotel & Spa 5-6 June 2012 and had the honour of presenting keynote speakers and workshop host that could make any digital and marketing conference something with a difference. Living Your Brand ensured participants that they will extract maximum value and take home a wealth of knowledge and guaranteed it will change the way I handle my marketing strategies.
The conference started off with a bang and it wasn’t a gun shot, but our first keynote speaker Mike Sharman from Retroviral who woke the crowd up, much quicker than a cup of coffee with his topic “The Blogger and the Beast”. He had the crowd captivated with an odd song and a random jump on the stage. My take away from his session that as a marketer you are always the beast so it’s best you dress to impress and he also believes experimentation is the most important aspect of online communication.
I enjoyed the breakaway sessions purely because I was allowed to challenge the workshop hosts. This gave it a human touch to interact directly with questions. The experts also shared some case studies of current and past clients.
My highlight from Day 2 was definitely the Ogilvy session. We as marketing practitioners think that we need to bring brands to life in the digital age, but was reminded by Ogilvy that digital is not ” the be all and end all”, TV, Print, Radio etc. still has an essential place in any digital campaign. Advertising works at its best when agencies combine Paid, Owned and Earned media to succeed.
How do we make that work you may ask, below should clear a few things up for you.
- Paid: Use this for scale, reach and speed. Social can’t do everything. Reach, scale and speed come from paid.
- Owned: For content, relationships, listening and co-creation. Open source opportunities are everywhere so we have to create great content, utility and apps.
- Earned: Social, Word of Mouth, PR, bloggers, influencers: Paid can’t do everything, you need a social and conversation strategy, not simply a presence on FB/Twitter etc.
My time spent at the conference was well worth it. I am definitely looking forward to the 2013 conference in anticipation.