Spent a very interesting morning at Added Value’s Ignite 2010 event. It was a seminar/workshop for the agency and its clients to talk about things that inspire them, get new ideas and feedback and generally network.
The session co-incided with the launch of its new tool AV-id, which is a type of social networking platform from which the agency and its clients can garner insight. You submit ideas and a network of people with their fingers on the pulse get back to you with feedback – at least, that’s the PR angle anyway.
We spent the morning throwing around some ideas about how to innovate, coming up with some ideas for new business models for brands and then submitting them to the AV-id social network. Amazingly, we really did get quite a lot of feedback, which I wasn’t expecting. (On the topic of what the feedback actually said, let’s just say that some people were complimentary about our ideas, whereas some people thought we were rubbish. Fair enough.)
All in all, a very interesting exercise. Nice to see how the marketers and agencies we write about do their jobs. For me, it was an insight into a different world that will no doubt be helpful when I’m writing and editing my features here at Marketing Week.
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GEEK ALERT – As part of the whole innovation theme of the event, we also got to try out a pen-and-paper system that converts to on-screen text and images. I have never actually got my hands on one of these before. My inner nerd was deeply excited to see this interplay between physicality and screen but as I’ve spent many years avoiding writing anything by typing very fast, not sure it would be used too often in my workplace. The illustrative capacities were great, though – I’d like to be able to transfer drawings to the computer with such ease.
