How do you get the upper-echelon of B.C.’s creative professionals to seriously consider dropping US$4,000 on a weekend in Vancouver in early December?
You eschew digital marketing wholesale – tempting tweets, minimalist emails and online testimonials from rock star creative directors – for some good old-fashioned face time.
It also helps that concepts like “the death of digital” and “experiential, in-person connection” are being discussed as the future of marketing by the very guests you’re trying to sell.
And so it went Wednesday night in Vancouver’s gentrifying Rail Town neighbourhood, where the Sweden- and New York-based Hyper Island Education Institute hosted its Hyper Island Playground series, described as “a collection of experiential gatherings designed to bring creative minds and thought leaders together.”
The invite-only event chummed the waters by inviting 70-plus senior marketers and offered a two-hour sneak peek into what the three-day Master Class involves, which is, based on last night and the breathless testimonials of graduates (as they’re known), a lot of inner analysis and difficult questions about why you do what you do.
“But it’s not all psychoanalysis,” says Jordan Eshpeter, of Vancouver-based web agency Domain7, who helped bring Hyper Island to Vancouver for the first time.
“The analysis of your place in the future of the industry is blended with seminars by incredibly smart and visionary people talking about the future of our food and human migration patterns in North America.”
His own Master Class experience in New York City last year shaped his thinking about the future of technology, he says. Eshpeter partnered with Richard Sandor from Eustress Marketing Coaching to bring Hyper Island to B.C.
This article originally appeared at BCBusiness.ca, the local media partner for the Hyper Island Master Class, while Marketing is the national media partner.
