Giving up an entire Saturday for a conference might seem like the actions of a crazy woman, but when the conference in question promises not to talk about blogging, advertising or brands it begins to make sense. especially in a twitter filled world where we’re bombarded with tech and advertising news every 30 seconds, it all gets a bit tiresome after a while.
The conference was of course Interesting 2008. The lovely Russell Davies organises a huge list of speakers to talk about anything they find interesting. A simple and brilliant premise. Nobody spoke for more than 20 minutes, and in some cases they kept it as short as 5 minutes. We had everything from Roo Reynolds enthusing about Lego through to Matt Dent talking about the coins he’s designed. The pace of the day was really bouncy, so it was difficult to get bored. So often when you go to a themed conference you just hear the same points being made over and over again; there was no danger of that at Interesting 08.
I do feel rather inspired by it; firstly to indulge more in the hobbies I love and secondly to rethink how I approach presentations. I’m often a bit lame and stick rigidly to the company template and just pop in a few Flickr photos of dogs. It’s not really enough. I’m presenting at the D&AD New Blood event tomorrow, so I bought a big block of blank paper yesterday and have put together a deck on the future of mobile advertising as told through badly drawn stick men. I might pop it up here when it’s finished.
xx
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