Wow! Doesn’t time fly? With the sights, sounds and smells of London’s O2 still fresh from this year’s MacAD.UK conference, the Early Bird reservations for 2018 went live today. Wow. Already? Of course, I knew it was coming. not least because I’m part of the marketing team and I’ve just spent a week in my studio editing videos. But, doesn’t it seem to have come around really fast? It feels that way to me.
One of the things I love about video, and particularly shooting voxpops live on site is the raw emotion you capture. I hope it comes across in the video I shot at MacAD.UK 2017?
The enthusiasm, excitement, anticipation and exuberance of the delegates is completely intoxicating when you’re at the event, but it was only watching the videos while I was editing them that brought that feeling straight back to me. And that feeling kind of got me thinking.
What is it about the MacAD.UK conference that’s so intoxicating?
I’ve been to dozens and dozens of business conferences throughout my career as a marketer and, if I’m honest, they bore the pants off me. But at MacAD, there’s a different vibe. Why?
Is it the Community?
I think partly it might be because of what those in the know call ‘the community’. There’s a very collaborative approach at play here and I must be honest… as a marketing person, I sit outside the community. But I look in at it and I’m in awe. Here is a bunch of seriously bright, professional and creative people and they prize community and the community’s values almost above all. You don’t see that in many areas of business, but you see it in spades at MacAD.
Is it Speakers with Substance?
I think it might also be that the speakers at MacAD are in many cases the creators too. At marketing conferences, keynote speakers tend to be self-promoting windbags traveling on air miles and most interested in the sound of their own voices. But here, the speakers are different. They make stuff. They do real stuff. They do cool stuff. Delegates are able to learn about tools they may use at work from the people that created them. That’s hard to beat.
Is it the Hands-on, No Nonsense Approach?
Perhaps the vibe at MacAD is also created because a great number of the delegates want to take what they learned, shared, discussed and debated back to their work environments to help their businesses. And, in many cases, the things they are taking back are extremely doable. At this year’s show, I caught up with a delegate I’d filmed at the first MacAD. He told me that he’s pretty much written his company’s IT agenda for the following year at MacAD 2016 and they’d implemented it all.
Whatever secret sauce David, Laura and their team of organisers use to create MacAD, it works for me. While I’m not wishing the year away and Christmas can’t be too far away in my opinion, I’m conflicted because I can’t wait for February and the next MacAD.
Please come and see me?
If you’re going, I hope to see you there. My name is Dom. Please come and see me in the video booth and talk to my camera. I’ll be hitting the edit suite next September and I need people like you to lift my spirits as the summer draws to a close.
MacAD.UK early bird tickets restricted to the first 100 registrations and are available on Macad.UK.