REMIX NYC: Culture, Technology & Entrepreneurship

This past September I had the pleasure of attending REMIX NYC – a 3 day conference on culture, technology and entrepreneurship held at the offices of Google, Bloomberg, and the MOMA. The three days were filled with incredible speakers across all three categories; there were inspiring speeches from the founders and digital leads of major cultural such as the Brooklyn Arts Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, roundtable discussions featuring the founders of small startup incubators to massive companies such as Youtube, and critical advice from entrepreneurs and entrepreneurially focused companies, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. In hindsight, the conference felt like half sales pitch, half inspiring lecture. But what really stuck with me was the sense of urgency needed to bring our cultural institutions (especially our museums) into the digital age, and the growing importance of digital technology to encourage and foster a culture of entrepreneurialism in our society.

A quote from John Maeda, featured on day 1 of the conference, seems to perfectly recap my takeaway from the conference. 

At the heart of all 3 days, REMIX was about visionary leadership and the ways it takes many forms, and yet, there was an implicit elephant in the room - a marketing challenge faced by every cultural institution, every entrepreneur and every brand that took the stage over the course of those 3 days - and it was most closely alluded to by charismatic speaker and Chief Digital Officer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sree Sreenivasan:

Marketing and advertising challenges are faced by every aspect of our culture - our cultural institutions, our startups and businesses (small, medium, and large), and they are all in need of the exact types of talent and skills one can find here at BIC. Sree, in particular, (repeatedly) encouraged everyone in attendance to check the job listings on his digital team at the Met, because it is a well established fact that branding & marketing professionals tend to gravitate immediately towards agencies and large clients for work. Because of that, cultural institutions in particular face an ongoing challenge of attracting and even registering on the radar of skilled branding & advertising professionals seeking to lend their skills and aid them in modernizing their communications and their brands. The opportunities - for both these institutions, small and medium sized companies, and these hungry young professionals - seem limitless.

With a name like RE:MIX, covering a hydra of topics like culture, technology and entrepreneurship, and 3 days worth of speakers from varying walks of life and lines of work, this conference, only in its second year, posed a slew of original thinking on digital and branding that are certain to shape the future of our culture and the way we do business, as both marketers and clients. If you're a visionary marketer looking to network with world class professionals from every corner of our culture, and have your mind expanded in the process, I'd strongly encourage you to check out RE:MIX NYC as soon as it's scheduled for 2015. In the meantime, I'd like to leave you with a couple of quotes that I made sure to write down to tease you with the kind of thinking you can expect at this year's conference:

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"The way we are with the internet is where China was with gunpowder" - via Nick Fortugno, Playmatics

"If you can get creative people together, and take money out of the equation, what would happen?" - via Timothy Shey, Youtube Spaces

"How do you tell a story using both physical space, historical objects and media? How do you combine both the physical and the digital to change your organization?" - via Sree Sreenivasan, The Met on digitizing physical experiences at museums

"How do we bridge the gap in institutions where some might not understand or embrace digital, or might be able to see the value in doing so?" via Brooklyn Arts Museum

"What better to invest in than to invest in innovators that are going to build and sustain the future?" - Dean Kamen (@FIRSTtweets) on the importance of STEM education