CONFERENCE RECAPS

Advertising Week 2013: The Visual Revolution and The New Creative Director By Edward Arredondo Dear friends and colleagues:   Late last year I had the opportunity to attend Advertising week which ran from September 23 to the 27th for the first time.  Sitting in the Times theater, surrounded by hundreds of professionals well versed in and passionate about their craft, I felt fortunate at being able to witness in person the many intelligent observations from several distinguished thought leaders in the field of Marketing, Advertising and even Design.  Two sessions that resonated with me were the "The Visual Revolution" and "The New Creative Director". The Visual Revolution Panel:   Ari Lewine - Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer,Triple Lift             Doug Scott - President, Ogilvy Entertainment             John Cantarella - President, Digital, News and Sports Group, Time Inc.             Steven Spurgat- Managing Director- Big Human

By Alex Suazo In a perfect world, I would have sat in my seat in front of the Evolve Media Stage, at Internet Weeks’ HQ, the entire week of May 19th. Instead, I could only attend one day but nonetheless learned so much from a variety of different marketing and digital industry professionals. The focus of conversation on the Evolve Media Stage Tuesday, hosted in tandem with social CRM enterprise Oracle Social, was retail and smart commerce. Panels and presentations included discussions around, “Harnessing Social Media for Authentic Commerce”, “Behavior of Shoppers – Truth About Shopping”, “Intelligent Packaging”, just to name a few.
 One of the key learnings that I felt echoed across all the panels was the fact that shopping is still a very emotional human behavior despite technology innovation; the reasons why we shop haven’t changed, it’s how we shop that has. Retailers are doing themselves a major disservice by trying to only focus on the “how” – the technical part of th