MC Week 2010

Going Digital: Changes in the Advertising and PR Industry,

3:30-4:45pm, OM 320

Brad Mays, Mike Cearley, Miker Stovall, Fleishman-Hillard Digital

This panel was made up of all Texas State Alumni. The point of this panel was to talk about how the industry is changing and becoming more like “Jackalope.” The panel talks about how clients are expecting more from agencies, and want a “one stop shop” for all their marketing needs.

The panel stresses the importance of building relationships over everything else. They say that it is important for brands to build relationships with consumers, and that new media is the way to reach them. An important point is that most clients don’t know what they want. The goal is to work together to drive brands, and find out how to tell the story of the brands.

Be Entertaining. Be Useful. or Be Ignored.

They also stressed the point that you are communicator and your job is to be a storyteller, and now new media gives you a place to stories.

A great example used in the presentation was their “Plug in on Chevy” campaign they put together for SXSW. They used all new media tactics to drive the brand and create recognition. By developing a Chevy Gowalla program they placed Chevy as an innovative brand in the market and appealed to a whole new audience. They also gave people Chevy cars and documented their road trips to Austin. This created a lot of buzz for the brand was relatively cheap for the amount of people they were reaching. A great tip given by the panel was to understand how people want to be communicated to in an environment and try to reach them in that way.

What’s Next?

Understand what’s next in new technologies and how people use them. Another piece of advice was to not have the same solution for every problem. Each client needs a tailored new media plan. Its about building context for people to build relationships and the rest will take off on its own.

Social Graces: Understanding and communicating with clients, co-workers, audiences and the media, 9:30-10:50am, Hines 204

David Wyatt & Lauren Tuttle, WyattBrand; Nick Weynand, Trademark Media

The purpose of this panel was how to use platforms appropriately, and how to understand and communicate with different audiences. The speakers gave a lot of great advice on how to manage different clients and their expectations. The first tip given by Lauren was to understand how to get info to clients. She says that being able to read people is and important skill the masters from the beginning because different people are comfortable with different channels of communication i.e. phone calls, text messages, email etc. You may not be able to communicate effectively with all clients the same way.

Another topic discussed in the panel was the importance of identifying the goals of the project. The speakers suggested identifying the goals of the project from the beginning and to pinpoint the larger goal the client wants to accomplish. The goal is not just to have a ton of followers on facebook, or visits to the website, there has to be more meaning. An important tip given by Lauren is to “Remember that you are dealing with people that have a completely different expertise than you do, and they may have different expectations and/or goals for the project that you know are not possible.” She strongly stressed the importance of identifying goals from beginning and to communicate why certain goals may or may not be possible. Another important tip is to separate personal feeling from goals, just because you may not like something doesn’t mean that the client dislikes it as well. Most importantly the panel suggests finding solutions to problems- do not just put brands through the same process and expect to see results every time. If you can’t meet expectations then you are not a good fit for the client.

Tips from panel:

Most important quality- being able to think strategically and handle issues the come up

Bringing laptops to meeting- still think its kind of weird, some clients are old fashioned and you can’t go wrong with pen and paper.

Job-hunting tips- don’t txt or tweet in interview; give interviewer your respect

Texting- more of social thing, starting to see rules changing but still think it is weird to text about business issues.

Calling on weekends- Depends on company culture and how important the clients is to you

Research- different clients have different audiences and you are constantly having to research different media outlets, communicates, exciting about agency environment, always something new, have to get into their world; becoming an expert in whatever comes up.