There were some great talks today; Nikesh Arora from Google, Marissa Mayer from Yahoo (which was a bit like a stakeholder presentation), Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Maureen Dowd and Executive Producer of Downtown Abbey, Rebecca Eaton – but really, you couldn’t go past the last minute addition of Kayne West, if not just for his quotable quotes. For example, the start of his presentation was really quite ironic when he said ‘I don’t want to make these big over the top statements that get quoted’, but then in typical Kayne style he proceeded to do just that. One that particularly got the crowd laughing was, ‘the world as a whole is f*cking ugly but I’m not in the construction business’. But on to more serious matters.
The highlight of the day for us was Maureen Dowd from the New York Times who wrote a story to talk about storytelling. Some of the key themes we learnt from her were 1) the channel doesn’t matter (whether the news is delivered by carrier pigeon or something else it still has to have the same core which is a story) 2) stories create culture which have an important part in creating pre-lived experiences, and 3) if you care about stories then you’ll be a great storyteller. In the same seminar Rebecca Eaton also shared her thoughts as to what makes a good story, including ‘there’s a lot of self-pleasuring going on in storytelling…think of the audience and make sure you’re connecting’.
It’s an exciting day ahead for us tomorrow as we get our brief for the Cannes Young Lions Marketing competition at 12pm. If you want to keep up to date with our progress, you can follow us on twitter @_laurajenkins @pippaKK
Cheers
Laura & Pippa