Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 2:42PM The 2012 4A's Strategy Festival will take place October 24-26, at 82Mercer. Stay tuned for more information on programming, speakers and more...coming soon!
2012, 4astratfest, 82mercer in about Monday, October 17, 2011 at 3:20PM The 2011 Strategy Festival proved to be an amazing success, filled with fascinating speakers and a tremendously engaged and active audience. We thank everyone who was there at 82Mercer in New York City for making the conference such a rewarding experience!
We are working diligently on processing the mountain of video, photos, and Jay Chiat Award-winning case studies from the event. Be sure to keep checking back here for the latest updates!
Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 11:12AM Gareth Kay, Chief Strategy Officer, Associate Partner, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, talks this year's Jay Chiat Awards for Strategic Excellence
It's very easy in this industry to get award apathy--there are so many award shows with so many overlapping categories it's easy to wonder which ones we should pay attention to and why we should care. Well, I strongly believe that the Jay Chiat Awards are one we (and, by we, I believe the marketing and advertising communities as a whole) should very much care about for a very simple reason.
About a year ago, Malcolm Gladwell we interviewed by GQ magazine and was asked a disarmingly simple question: "Would you rather be interesting or right?" His answer was highly revealing: "If I were President of the United States, I would rather be right than interesting. If I were a CEO of a company, I would rather be right than interesting. But I am a journalist--what journalist would rather be right than interesting?"
I think we, as strategists, are far more like journalists than CEOs. Other awards judge the "right-ness" of work, whether the work worked (the EFFIEs) or whether it was creatively powerful (insert your favorite creative award show here). The Jay Chiat Awards are the only awards in the US (and one of only two globally when you include the UK Account Planning Group awards) that measure the "interesting-ness" of the work we do. They have a wonderfully blunt focus on fresh thinking that inspires great (creative and effective) work.
For the last few years I've been incredibly lucky to be asked to judge the awards. It gives you a great snapshot of the current health of the industry. You get an immediate sense of the diversity and evolution of planning at both a macro and micro level: you see everything from brilliant ways to create new brands from century-old products to the use of new research techniques that help give us a better map of the world. It shows how planning is thriving by its ability to adapt to different markets and, more importantly, a different cultural landscape and a different speed of business.
This diversity and evolution of strategic thinking is wonderfully evidenced in this year's shortlisted papers and crop of winners. It's proof positive that there is no "one way" to plan and that the very best planning comes from asking better questions that set you off on a different journey.
So I urge you to try and read the papers (coming soon to JayChiatAwards.com) and enjoy learning about the journey, not the destination. I think you'll learn a lot. And hopefully the papers will encourage you to try and take a more interesting journey in the work you do every day.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 3:57PM Suzanne Powers, Global Strategy Officer, Crispin Porter + Bogusky reflects on the Account Planning Conference of years past...and the excitement that is this year's Strategy Festival!
I’ve personally been involved in the account planning community for too many years to count! Our APG—and then subsequent 4A's—conferences were always a hit.
Every year, we challenged ourselves to bring more and more inspiration to a community that frankly is in the business of inspiration itself…not an easy task! We typically tried for a combination of inspiration and instruction, the practical and the magical, bringing in speakers from both inside and outside the community, from purveyors of chaos theory to seasoned industry leaders.
And, though we always attempted a “workshop” approach to our breakout and instructional sessions, it was always difficult to truly harness the brain power of the amazing people who gathered for these conferences.
This is what I’m most excited about in regards to the evolution of the Account Planning Conference into the Strategy Festival. Inspiration can come from anywhere, from the speakers themselves, but, even moreso, from the attendees pre-, during and post-festival.
The festival offers a more intimate and conversational experience, more about bumping people and ideas into each other over the couple of days. We have a ton of great stimuli for discussion from the speakers we’ve collected to the crazy-smart case studies we’ll hear from the Jay Chiat Awards Gold winners. I’m imaging a buzz of energy and ideas that will begin at the festival and continue on to infuse the strategy community with great thinking for days, weeks and months to come! See you there!
Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 1:47PM If you believe there is waste in the advertising process…
If you believe that the assembly-line approach isn't working…
If you wonder what creative briefs are really good for anyway…
If you think agencies really could learn from startups…
If you want to try a different approach in a hands-on, hack the status quo, kind of way…
…Then you'll want to attend the How to Do Lean Planning workshop at the 4A's Strategy Festival.
We're going to focus on some basic tenents of Lean thinking (building on ideas from Eric Ries' The Lean Startup and Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany), and show how the modern brand is in greater need of a campaign model than a creative brief (with a twist on the Business Model Canvas). We'll talk about what it means when you hear buzzwords like "lean," "customer development," "validation," "prototype," "iterate," and "pivot." And we'll touch on what we can learn from service design thinking to help us develop new, more useful and effective programs for our clients.
But most importantly, we're going to engage workshop participants (hopefully, that includes you!) in a hands-on use of these principles to reimagine what a brand could make for an underserved audience. Maybe it's a traditionally male-focused brand who nonetheless has female customers; maybe it's a tech company focused on affluent, white, tech enthusiasts, when young, less affluent, African American or Latinos are equal users of their device; maybe it's a television network that needs to embrace an older audience rather than chasing a younger one…
Regardless of the scenario, teams will work together in a fast-paced, hands-on session where you get to blow up old theories, develop new ones, and even get out on the street to test your hypotheses with real people.
It's going to be incredibly fun, and incredibly challenging—but what's most exciting is knowing that within about 90 minutes time, some of the best ideas some of you've ever had will be raised, developed, and even validated with real people. And it'll be a great chance to get out of the building and test your empathy for the man (or woman!) on the street.
Can't wait to see everyone there—and to keep iterating on this workshop format. It's worked brilliantly three times before, and I know that a 4As crowd will take it to a new level.
See you there!
Farrah Bostic is Founder and Creative Strategist at The Difference Engine. Join her on Friday, October 14 at 10:30 for her breakout workshop, Lean Planning.
