Ad Poop: INBOUND15 or This Might Work / This Might Not Work
The park outside INBOUND 2015 (featuring those lovely food trucks).
By now, it’s (hopefully) no surprise that I pay my cat vet bills and keep Siggy in rhinestones by working in marketing and advertising. Ad Poop is concerned with good, the bad, and the less-than-flattering aspects of the ad world. Got an idea for Ad Poop? Let me know.
INBOUND15 or This Might Work / This Might Not Work
Marketing conferences are a bit of a seesaw. Not only are you balancing travel, breakout sessions, food truck food, free booze, and fitting in time to explore a different zip code, but you're frequently juggling regular requests from the home office. On the upside, you're sitting spellbound in the audience of a keynote speech, forgetting to drink your tea while your note-taking skills are put to the test. On the downside, you're joining a mass exodus from a session run by a marketing circuit preacher, spewing empty proverbs about Facebook hacks or lead conversion.
A colleague and I visited Boston last week for HubSpot's annual INBOUND conference. There were upsides (e.g. most of the breakout sessions, Club INBOUND, Amy Schumer, Boston) and down (e.g. lack of sleep, lack of fresh fruit for anyone who happens to be on WW, a handful of marketing circuit preachers spewing empty proverbs), but the experience was mostly positive.
Below, I've collected a few of the key takeaways from a variety sessions, equal parts professorial and profane:
"Success is being able to hold two competing thoughts in your head at once: this might work; this might not work." --- Seth Godin, on new endeavors
"We don't appreciate simplicity unless we know the complexity it is distilled from." --- Carmen Simon, on messaging
"We're all on page 2 million of the shittiest book ever." --- Aziz Ansari, on social media
"If we've got nothing to say, we should shut the hell up." --- Joseph Jaffe, on marketing
"I don't think we have to accommodate people's shitty attention span." --- Marc Maron, on the ideal length of a podcast
"Actively seek out your weaknesses and share them openly. Only a confident brand can make fun of itself." --- Doug Kessler, on "insane honesty" in marketing messaging