2022 Agenda

Social Media Advertising

Modern Search & Social: Why Your ROAS Are Dropping

Are you still manually managing granular campaigns, but your ROAS are dropping? With the progress of Artificial Intelligence over the past few years, machines can now predict trends and make automated decisions in real-time. With this, it is crucial for advertisers to explore this new modern approach. By making the shift from overly segmented targeting and using too many keywords, to a simplified and more efficient account structure, you’re allowing machine learning to work to its best ability. In this session, Ashley Royalty, Director of Add3SHOP, will discuss modern practices and full-funnel activations that helped transform brands like IT Cosmetics, Nuun, and Elemis into million-dollar assets.

ASHLEY ROYALTY Add3SHOP / Account Director

UX / UI

UX Localization: Design for the global audience

As we are in a global market, there’s more to win over international audiences than just translate text into another language or simply updating UI components. Localizing your user experience design is to adapt international products for a specific region to create relevant and appropriate experiences for users. With extensive experience in UX/UI design and visual design for the global audience, Shantelle Liu will share the the matters, the definition, and best practices of localizing user experience design.

Shantelle Liu Zoom / eCommerce UX Designer

SEO

Websites for Humans: Holistic SEO in 2022

Website marketing has an altruism problem. While forward-thinking professionals are beginning to understand that successful websites are built for humans, too many of us are still trying to ""game the system"" to stay in Google's good graces. Decision-makers have been burnt by cookie-cutter agencies and frustrated by strategies that don't seem to spark movement. The key to accelerating and future-proofing your online presence is in rethinking your SEO program to involve more teams, inform more decisions, and bring the focus back to your users.

  • In this session, you'll learn:
  • How to think beyond page titles and meta descriptions to design a modern, sophisticated website strategy
  • How to tell whether your SEO agency is worth the price tag
  • How to maximize your investment in SEO by removing silos and adopting a 360-degree perspective"

Kavi Kardos Corporate Finance Institute / Director of SEO

Design

How The Heck Was That Made?!

As designers, we aim to capture attention through our work, generating awe-inspiring content that stays true to the brands we work with. This session will take a step back from the granular details of creative production to focus on the strategic intentions of immersive design. When you design both large and small scale experiences, not just features, your brand can deliver a more holistic, universal impact to customers.

Hear from VTProDesign’s Chief Creative Officer, Michael Fullman, as he discusses some of the behind-the-scenes details and strategic approaches that have helped develop interactive projects for Netflix, Ray-Ban, DoorDash, and many other well-known brands this year.

Alex Ilten VTProDesign / Executive Creative Director

Social Media

How to Bring Social Media In-House and Make it thrive!

When you started your business you probably didn’t think about all the day-to-day marketing and promotion you’d be doing. You’re not a marketer but you know you need marketing. Outsourcing your social media marketing is great way to establish consistency in your online presence, while allowing you to focus on what you do best — your business. However, a company’s marketing strategy should be integrated into every part of your business to be more effective. Learn how you can bring marketing in-house and build a social media team that can thrive over time.

Marisa Peacock The Strategic Peacock / Chief Strategist

AI / Interactive

Building for the Metaverse - from AI-generated stories to interactive volumetric content

The Metaverse will require more content than we can realistically build manually, and it will need to be dynamically generated, personalised and completely interactive. This talk focuses on two groundbreaking projects: Creating an entirely AI-generated and interactive TV show and our inevitable future of 3D streamed media, specifically interactive streamed volumetric sports broadcasts. Adam will show how both projects work under the hood with live demos of the technology and breakdowns of the key points. Components include procedural cinematography, shot evaluation, ML pose estimation, dialogue and narrative synthesis, touch interactivity, intuitive UX and the challenges of streaming huge amounts of content to mobile devices. You’ll see what will hopefully be the very first, fully AI-generated TV show running 24 hours a day and never before presented versions of the latest Metacast technology, transforming how media is broadcast.

Adam Myhill Unity / Creative Director

Design

Create a bright Future of Work through Speculative Design

What if covid-19 lasts for another ten years? What if AI takes over our jobs?... Most of us are biased toward the negatives when envisioning the future of work. With a problem-oriented mindset, we miss millions of opportunities to create a preferable future. In this interactive session, Elena will walk us through a new field emerging from design and tech - Speculative Design. As a group, we will use a Speculative Design framework to create a blueprint of our most desirable future of work, embracing technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Brain-Computer Interface, and Blockchain. This session will challenge the ordinary “problem solving” approach to innovation in business. You will walk away from this session with a completely different mindset and a practical framework at hand for your next innovation.

ELENA CAI eBay / UI/UX Designer, Content Creator

UX / UI

Designing Health Solutions for The Ultimate Wellness Consumer

Everything Gen Z does is connected to health — their relationships, their habits, their technology. We are witnessing the first generation in a long time who is united in a common mission: to be well. Despite a health pandemic marking some of their most influential years, Gen Z has adapted and demonstrated their resiliency by normalizing conversations around emotional health, incorporating daily rituals that address mental and physical health, and are redefining what quality of care means. As we think about what the future of health looks like - one that is being carved by Gen Z and their beliefs, influences and behaviors - we must ensure we’re designing for a future that meets their needs and ideologies. Linus Group Founder & CEO Hamid Ghanadan will outline how organizations can better innovate for this generation, drawing on insights from Linus’ 2021 and 2019 studies on Gen Z and the future of health.

Hamid Ghanadan The Linus Group / Founder & CEO
Kristin Apple The Linus Group / President

Marketing / Copywriting

Craft killer headlines: Embracing creativity as an analytical copywriter

Your superpower is developing strategic copy that's grounded in rationale. But when it comes to writing creative headlines, it might not come easy. From left brain to right brain, Brianne will share her journey to enhanced creativity and share four frameworks you can use to get out of your head and write headlines that stick. You won't explore your typical 'how-to' and listicle headlines in this session. Go beyond the surface and walk away with immediately actionable strategies and the confidence to generate a sea of creative headlines for your next copywriting project.

Brianne Dromey One Net Inc. / Senior Copywriter & Brand Strategist

Design / Branding

When it’s time to treat yourself like a true client

The cobbler’s children and their lack of shoes is an overused reference but so handy as a quaint way to say, ‘we’re too busy doing work for other people to focus on ourselves.’ When Tether was founded more than fourteen years ago, a temporary logo and website was hastily created in order to have something to make Tether look legitimate. And, you guessed it, that temporary logo and website became permanent for way too long.  
 
In this presentation, Steve will reveal the process and results of being a good client to ourselves as we created a new face for Tether, including a sneak peek of the new website that will go live in November.

STEVE BARRETT Tether / Executive Creative Director

Marketing & Communications

Communicating Clickable Complexities: from nuclei to AI

So some scientists mapped thousands of brain cells....why should you care? Rachel and Jenny tell the crazy cool stories behind the complicated science of the Allen Institute. In this session, you’ll learn marketing, communications, and SEO tips to promote complex topics to your audience. From building relationships with subject matter experts to finding surprising angles that make technical topics approachable, you’ll walk away with new ideas to make any tricky topic shine and to grow your audience beyond just the experts.

Jenny Burns Allen Institute / Digital Content Manager
Rachel Tompa, Ph.D. Allen Institute / Senior Editor

Programmatic Advertising

A Renaissance for the Web: Moving on from Cookies

The constant pressure on marketers to prove return on ad spend (ROAS) is receiving particular emphasis heading into 2023. Economic headwinds are signaling uncertainty, retail is transforming rapidly as shoppers return to stores after over two years of quarantine and a mainstay of digital advertising — third-party cookies — are continuing to collapse.

The good news is that marketers don’t have to navigate these challenges (and opportunities) alone. Learn how this fast-evolving digital landscape can remake programmatic advertising to benefit marketers and consumers alike. Heading into next year, what trends can marketers expect in digital advertising, and how can they leverage the power of people-based advertising to succeed in the evolving landscape?>

Ruben Ayala Viant / Director, Sales

Branding / UX

Converge — Branding in the age of UX

Branding and identity can be frustratingly subjective. Wil Arndt shows how he and his team employed user experience methods—some established, some less traditional—to bring logic to a very emotional naming and rebranding process, whittle 3,839 potential names down to 1, and get everyone to agree and even love the result.

This talk is for anyone who works in strategy, branding, marketing, graphic design, research, user experience and all the possible overlaps of each. Audience members will walk away with a tool kit of 9+ methods and approaches they can use to uncover insights, improve consensus, and harvest creative ideas from disparate groups.

Wil ARndt OXD / Creative Director

Content Marketing

What Does Cinderella Have to Do with Blogging?

Getting people to your website is just the first step. Once they're there, your content needs to keep them engaged long enough to get them to the call to action. The best way to engage readers is through stories, so in this presentation, Alison Ver Halen will provide actionable tips you can use to include stories in your content that demonstrate the value your business provides so your target audience is primed to take your call to action.

Alison Ver Halen AV Writing Services, LLC / CEO

Creative / AI

Artificial Intelligence has become creative. (Should creative professionals be worried?)

Andrew Wilcox, a veteran advertising creative director, will walk through some of the more recent advances artificial intelligence has made into various fields of creativity. Then, from the perspective of a professional creative human, Andrew will analyze the question of whether his job (and yours) is in jeopardy as AI gets more creative— or if, on the contrary, AI will become our ultimate creative collaborator.

Andrew Wilcox Simple Works / Creative Director

Brand / Storytelling

How the Story of YOU Gets Created and Told

History is not simply a chronology of events that happened in a particular order. History is a meticulously curated phenomenon of power. How history is created -and who gets to tell that story- has one of the most significant impacts on our society. But we never talk about it.

In this talk, we’re going to! We will explore how history is constructed and how we can use that knowledge to create the legacy for which we want to be remembered. We will learn about the roles of presence and absence in history-making and how those who leverage those roles often control power. We will also discuss practical ways in which we can all reclaim our personal agency and drive the narrative that will become our lives, our families, and our society.

Learning Objectives

  1. Discover the secrets to history-making that have remained unchanged for centuries.
  2. Learn how to actively write your own story in the way you’d wish to be remembered.
  3. Take-away four techniques to help harness the power of your own story."

Dominique Luster, MLIS The Luster Company / Founder

Marketing & Communication

Shifting from Me to We: The Rise of Online Community

There is a massive shift happening in the social and media space as GenZ and Younger Millennials are shifting their time and attention away from traditional social platforms and leaning into healthier, community-based options. The trust in news and influencers is on the decline, and this is changing the landscape quickly.

From a brand perspective, all of the iOS and Android changes are forcing marketers to rethink targeting, audiences and shift toward interests, passions and other signals.
These two forces (consumer and marketer shifts), along with the economy, are creating the most important inflection point for businesses and people in over a decade.

Paul Peterman Reddit / Senior Managing Director

Strategy

Everything Connect - Can the world’s biggest brands survive the web’s next big evolution?

Connect is both the lifeblood of capitalism, and its most volatile competitive field. In this Arena, the mightiest of brands compete – in a state of near permanent transformation – to be the primary point of connection between people, between things, and between people and things. Over the next 100 years, humans will experience the equivalent of 20,000 years of technological advancement. In the Decade of Possibility, changes that once took decades will happen in years – or even months, driving a revolution in the ways people and things Connect. What does this mean for brands?
Everything…

Andrew Stewart Interbrand / Executive Director, Strategy

Brand Strategy

Pushing the Boundaries: How the Wildest Ideas Make the Best Campaigns

As the market has become saturated with advertisements for consumers, leaning into pop culture has proved to be the key to standing apart, especially since 38% of people consider brand involvement in pop culture either important or very important. Still, many brands opt to stay on the conservative side and avoid taking big (albeit culturally relevant) risks. When The Narrative Group took a seemingly “boring” product like yogurt and made it bold by championing the sometimes controversial “cannabis holiday” with Harmless Harvest’s “Harmless Hits Different” Pack a Bowl campaign for 4/20, they were met with 168M earned media impressions, 11M influencer impressions, and record-breaking sales. The success continued with their “thirstiest summer” campaign promoting their coconut water, tapping into “thirst traps” and recognizing “the thirst is real” with their consumers, and logging over 3M impressions in the first 3 months alone. Rebecca can share why bold, culturally relevant, and sometimes “risky” ideas can lead to the most successful campaigns.

At the end of this session, the audience will be able to:

  • Understand what “brand swagger” is and how you can use that confidence and boldness to boost your brand and campaigns
  • Navigate and find the right threshold for trying new ideas that still align with the brand
  • Develop a strategy to connect to an audience who “gets it” - building trust with your current audience but also expanding to new ones

Rebecca Coleman The Narrative Group / President

UX/UI Accessibility

Experiencing Extremes: A Design Team's Guide to Accessibility

Experience may be the best teacher, but how does a team experience accessibility? We generally learn best by doing or feeling for ourselves. An accessibility workshop has the power to bring that immediate sense of understanding to teams – and personal understanding results in better solutions. In this session, Jess Vice outlines why accessibility is a strategic investment. With her expertise in UX and design responsibility, she will walk the audience through a framework for a tactical accessibility workshop to make equitable design a priority for every team.

Jess Vice Struck / Strategy Director

Design

Photography In the Metaverse

As much as we take photos throughout our lives and now grab screen captures of our connected virtual moments, the tools will converge as we move through the metaverse. The way we capture what we see will change, but our want to remember, interpret (editing), re-imagine (editing!) and share will continue.

Bryan O'Neil Hughes Adobe / Director of Product Management

Creative & Technical Thinking

Creativity Meets Technology: Framing web3 for Brands

The Metaverse and blockchain-based tokens sound like nerdy buzzwords but they represent the bleeding edge of new opportunities for brands to cultivate relationships with their audience, from creating new product experiences to building real communities.

Luis will share his entirely subjective view on what's possible here based on nearly two years of immersion in the space (which feels like seven years in web3 world).

You'll hear about:
Tapping into an emerging wellspring of creativity
Harnessing technology to empower the audience
Nurturing environments of authenticity and fascination
Leveraging new kinds of data for programmability and insights

Luis Antezana CROWN / Director of Strategy & Technology