Yes& was engaged to the max at this year’s Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit. Some of our team attended to network and learn, some were there to discuss challenges with attendees at the Yes& booth, and we even had team members lead a session with clients. It was a great day exploring challenges and innovative solutions with the great minds of the marketing and communications professional community.
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Here are some of the important takeaways and learnings our team walked away with this year:
🔴 “What are the attributes that make for successful marketing leaders in today’s fast-paced environment? Good judgement and effective influence. Today’s leaders need to make decisions expediently and activate resources quickly to address crisis situations or unique opportunities. Without those two competencies, your writing and software skills are not as effective.”
– Andy Blenkle, Yes& Senior Vice President, Public Sector
🔴 “Rishad Tobaccowala said ‘Change sucks. But irrelevance is worse.’ As CEO I paid attention when he said that most leaders put their attention where the budget is—95% on today. Instead, a leader should put at least 25-30% of time toward the future.”
– Robert Sprague, Yes& President and CEO
🔴 “I enjoyed the Smart Brevity session. It was all about how to write less and say more. A few things the speaker, Mike Allen, shared: What is the #1 thing you want the reader to know or do? Put that at the top of your content (email, blog, etc.), don’t bury it.
- Think and talk with others before you type.
- Say it out loud.
- How would you say what you want to say in a tweet? What would make the reader want to click/engage
- Would you read this if you hadn’t written it?"
– Amanda McCarthy, Yes& Director of Marketing
🔴 “Clients and in-house teams need some sort of digestible ‘state of the union’ resource to keep up with changes in the social and digital landscape. When tech brands go through changes or platforms release new features, having a newsletter or internal update could be critical in keeping up and adapting existing brand strategies more quickly.”
– Nicole Glueckert, Yes& Director of Integrated Marketing and Channel Strategy
🔴 “I walked away with some great reminders on branded content development from multiple sessions:
- Tell, don’t sell.
- People are conditioned to see conflict first, not love. Assure your content embodies empathy, equality, and partnership.
- Be true to yourself and create a brand voice that reflects your values.
- Create content that taps into the desires, aspirations, and empowerment of your audience.”
– Veronica Oleynik, Yes& Vice President, Account Management, Government
🔴 “I walked away with a super simple statement that was made during a session on the topic of what sales teams need from marketing, but I believe it also applies to internal and client relationships: ‘Healthy friction and tension is ok in an organization. Good things end up happening as a result of those types of conversations.’ This resonated because one of our clients has expressed wanting our agency to challenge his organization and shared this quote on LinkedIn, ‘A hallmark of healthy culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms... candor is the key to collaborating effectively. Lack of candor leads to dysfunctional environments.’ Not all clients take this position, but I've found that the best clients embrace this.”
– Stacey DeOrzio, Yes& Vice President, Account Management
🔴 “From a session speaker perspective, I always learn something new by how people respond to your session. In this case, I felt like there was an agreeance to our strategy but our clients, specifically in the non-profit and association space, there is a struggle with content generation. What I've heard, and what we've all heard from our clients, is a need for a real strategy around content generation itself. In the age of high-fidelity content, it is critical that our clients find a way to be relevant in video-centric channels when appropriate. I thought my co-presenter Nicole Glueckert gave an excellent response to an attendee's question around ‘How can we generate content cost-effectively?’ The response was:
- User-generated Content (UGC)
- Do you even NEED to be using that particular channel if you can't generate content for it? (I love this one by the way. Lots of head nods.)”
– Anthony Robinson, Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy