Putting your money where your mouth is

Last week a few of us went over to the B.Creative Showcase, an event by Blueskies a recruitment company. The event featured 70 pieces of work from agencies and in-house teams, played host to 2 guest speakers and a young creative’s portfolio clinic. These youngsters were then encouraged to speak to the assembled guests in the hope of attracting attention and employment. It’s been done before but I do like the fact Blueskies Creative does this – they’re giving back – opening their wallet. It helps show they at least understand what we (as an industry) do, what we look for, how we like a free drink and how we like to show off.

That leads me to a shameless plug. Our ‘really proud of’ piece of work featured that evening was from our Generation Green and the Eco-Rangers campaign. Here’s our specially crafted poster for the event.

Last year we had our This is Living campaign on display, composed for the large-scale, print friendly resolution and with no browser windows.

Rory says

Rory Sutherland was one of the guest speakers at the event and he certainly got a positive reaction. His talk was based around 3 points addressed to all:

1) Ban advertising in the press until the journalists you are indirectly paying for actually right something positive (read more about this at Rory’s blog)

2) Nurture young talent, especially in these difficult times otherwise we’re likely to have a large gap in our collective skill base in a few years.

3) Start being positive, start saying we’re doing this ‘as well as’ not ‘instead of’. Consumers media spend has gone up considerably with the digital media revolution yet brands continue play one channel off against another.

So in the spirit of this post, we’ll see lot’s of action; press advertising fall off a cliff to then rally with a ground swell of feel-good journalism. Agencies taking in a good number graduates this summer which manifests a up-surge in creative quality and output in the run up to the London Olympics in 2012. Increased collaboration between agencies as brands use the multitude of channels at their disposal, to gain increased success. That would all be a good thing.

I’d be lying if I said our own wallets are tightly wedged into our open and expectant mouths, but points 2 and 3 are being worked on right now and I hope to tell you a little more about them in the near future. Let’s remember to look out for those just starting out, let us put our money where our mouth is, after all, that’s what new marketing should be doing.

UPDATE

Rory’s full speech can be found here.