There are a couple of conferences happening at the moment (I am attending none of them) … but looking at the blog coverage, there are some recurring themes.
Emily sums it all up with the following:
No one knows what’s going on in the new media space.
We’re all figuring it out.
A perfect opportunity to sit down and talk to each other. But all of our old habits of interacting are still firmly in place.
Posturing looks ridiculous in a world with no hierarchy.
And from the Ad:Tech conference there is this nicely self-reflexive gem:
Since the rooftop bar was filled with sweaty, semi-intelligent people, Ariel and I went downstairs where there was AC and sat for a while talking about why it seems there are an inordinate amount of people in the industry who talk about topics like viral marketing or search engine marketing but few who actually engage in the practice. Our conclusion? In advertising, we love to hear ourselves talk. We love to write books. We love to moderate panels and give speeches. We love to stand in front of a client and spew forth meaningless words that sound intelligent and one-up us because the client doesn’t know what they mean. We love to dress cool even though we’re over 30 and shouldn’t. We love to borrow other’s ideas and call them our own. We love to outsource work to others and take all the credit. We love to promise the client our agency can, of course, perform even the most obscure service when, clearly, we can not. We love to wallow in our perceived cool factor when the rest of the world hates what we do as a business. Isn’t this business great?
Probably saved myself a ton of grief by NOT being there … but then, I could have been lucky and been able to hang out with Emily or Steve.
S.
“Posturing looks ridiculous in a world with no hierarchy.”
I love it. That’s a comment with some serious teeth…
Yes and the ideas are great but they just describe the situation and do not give any conclusions.
That’s rediculos how we manage to analyse the situation and forget about real actions.
In this situation we should remember about usual ethics and start being more polite and creative to produce our own content and service.
And af course, don’t ever promise your clients the things you cannot do cause it will result with complete defeat for you and desperation for a client. Do we need it?
In fact we work to get satisfaction and I’m sorry for people who don’t.