I spent an interesting day at the IPA and Times Media Fast Strategy conference yesterday. It took a slightly different tack – while we learnt about strategies for delivery strategy fast, three teams actually went off and responded to a brief set by the COI in 3 hours. All three of them had luminary types in them, and all three had more or less digital expressions of strategy from the hilarious (and brilliant) Dog Nike + to boneidol.com, but predictably the group led by the most traditional ad focused team (with the weakest digital iterations) won. I say predictably because looking at the attendee list it was heavily populated by traditional advertising agency members and even the digital kids were mostly from an advertising background. It felt as if they couldn’t see past the 30 second spot , no real feeling of potential.
One of the most interesting talks and paradoxically one of the biggest missed opportunities was Rob Forshaw’s from Grand Union. He spoke very eloqently and interestingly about why digital has to be viewed and integrated into campaigns differently – very true and very important. HOweve the point of the day was to talk about Fast Strategy, fast ways to get difficult thinking done effectively and this was a chance to address that in the digital arena.
Best bits – PLanning for Good getting plugged, plugged and plugged again; Getting sight of some of the tools used in Disruption by TBWA; fairy cakes
Worst bits – having to force myself to go and talk to people; having to vote for someone else to win £2500 to go on holiday! What?! They probably got paid to talk anyway and even if they didn’t it’s way over valued!
Enough maundering – I am off on holiday myself next week (honeymoon actually) so I can’t complain…
