Day 3: Advertising Week Europe

We attended lots of great sessions on day 3 of Advertising Week Europe, from the IPA session on Big Tech vs Big Ideas to MEC’s session on Creativity and Collaboration. Instead of summarising our take outs from every event we attended, we have decided to share our two highlights from the day.

Clear Channel’s We Love Outdoor session was one of the highlights from today. After two days full of people throwing around well-intentioned buzz-words such as ‘collaboration’ and ‘innovation’ it was a refreshing change to step into a room and hear something a little different. In this session we heard directly from clients on how OOH is helping them achieve their business goals and change peoples lives for the better.

It was particularly lovely to hear from Jo Youle, CEO of Missing People talk about how DOOH has helped grow awareness of the charity from 13% in 2007 to currently over 20% in London. Most importantly it was rewarding to hear how the partnership between ourselves, Clear Channel & the Outdoor Media Centre has helped reunite missing people with their loved ones. Since the campaign began in 2012, we have delivered over 500 regionalised campaigns, and over 50% of the people featured in these campaigns are now reunited with their loved ones.

Also speaking about some great OOH campaigns they have run in conjunction with Clear Channel was Glen Wilson from Posterscope. He spoke about the delightful Art Everywhere project which delivered on its promise to make England a little more attractive – a concept which is now being taken on around the world.

The Princes Trust gave a powerful testimony as to how, through OOH, they are now not only able to reach young people who are in need of their services, but also to reach those crucial donors through great creative and the extensive reach that OOH offers.

A real heartwarming presentation. #WeLoveOutdoor.

Another great session of the day, was from Andrew Millstein, President of Disney Animations who revealed a few secrets about the art of storytelling with Disney. Talking about the so-called ‘dark days’ of Disney from the mid-nineties to early 2000’s, Millstein discussed how, after the Pixar acquisition, they weaved together two distinct strands of success in order to build the Disney we have today.

It was inspirational to hear how they have maintained that creative spark after 93 years, and how they keep pushing themselves to create the stories which inevitably become part of the tapestries of our lives.

Collaboration has certainly been one of the keys to Disney’s success. They maintain this is by instilling ownership of each project within all teams working on Disney films, a process which brings out in everybody a real passion and desire to find the best solution. This process takes time but ultimately it is one of the key elements leading to Disney getting the story right time and time again, and it’s something we can certainly attest to after working on many projects with them.

It’s been such a full on week so far, one more day to go.