Getting Cannected

The event was a celebration of the creativity of the UKÂ’s digital marketing industry. Cannected was aptly timed to coincide with the Cannes Lions Festival.

Marketing for broadcast
Alice Tonge from 4Creative gave a great spotlight on how to make the most out of your creative journey. Top tips were ‘do the obvious, then do the opposite’, she also spoke about how making mistakes was super important for the learning process and how sometimes, the best ideas come from having no brief at all! Alice put a massive focus on trusting your intuition when it comes to creativity, rather than being dictated by the ‘right way’ or the ‘familiar way’. Alice spoke about the fantastic ‘Gay Mountain’ video created by her team, which aired across all of Channel 4’s television channels on the day of the official opening of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, 7 February 2014 and was designed to provoke conversation surrounding sexuality and discrimination in sport. Gay Mountain drew a hugely positive response, with ‘ ‘likes’ outnumbering ‘dislikes’ on YouTube by 10:1 after two months following its release!

Facebook to reach a younger audience
Another fantastic speaker was Heidi Ellis. Heidi is the Head of Media Strategy for the BBC and spoke about how she and her team overcame the challenge of appealing to a ‘new’ younger audience with the new series of Doctor Who. She explained the creative process, how her and her team brainstormed about ‘what was missing’ and how the decision to introduce a female doctor, was reached. The media team ran several experiments on Facebook with small trailer extracts in areas such as: comedy, action and so, on. The target audience was 18-24 and they used learnings from the reactions to all trailers to help them create the perfect dynamic video for broadcast.

Influencing politics
Gemma Bardsley, Consulting Director of Ogilvy also attended the event. If you haven’t heard of Ogilvy, they are the amazing agency who worked alongside Greenpeace to launch the David Attenborough campaign to get plastic out of the ocean! Gemma talked through how Sir David Attenborough delivered The People’s Seat Address to World Leaders at #COP24, as well as the planning and design for the campaign – which aimed to put the people’s voice into the United Nations and using a majorly respected national treasure, seemed to do the trick. The impactful film, created for Greenpeace, called on supermarkets to dramatically reduce their plastic footprint, which has already been signed by more than 1,234,782 to date.

AR and sensory marketing
Another interesting speaker was James Bennett – Brand Development Lead at Instagram. James presented some super inspirational slides on how Facebook and Instagram are looking to bring AR into marketing with interactive ads and filters, designed to give the user a more personal experience.