Despite a pesky plume of volcanic ash that is wreaking havoc with trans-Atlantic air travel, it’s all systems go for the Festival of Media in Valencia, Spain and Marketing magazine will be there.
Marketing‘s Jeff Beer will shortly be on his way across the Atlantic–heading for a stopover in Rome first where, last we heard, the airport was still open–and should be in Valencia in plenty of time for the opening reception Sunday evening.
Monday morning, two packed days of presentations featuring the world’s top media thinkers begins with an address by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales who will “look towards the next generation of the web and ask what all the new immersive technologies will mean for the next generation of consumers–and for commerce, communication and even democracy itself.”
Monday will conclude with a keynote from Ben Silverman, founder and CEO of Electus–and former co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media–discussing his partnership with Barry Diller to create a new kind of content business which he has described as “a new form of advertising network in coordination with the traditional and the new-media outlets.”
Other speakers scheduled to take part over two days of discussions and presentations include:
• Visa’s CMO Antonio Lucio
• Diane Dudeck, senior director of Cisco Worldwide Media
• Geert Van Kuyck, Philips CMO
• Mike Cooper,Worldwide chief executive officer, PHD
• Henkel’s CMO Christian-André Weinberger
• Damian Burns, head of global agency relations, Google
• Gian Fulgoni, executive chairman & co-founder, comScore
The Festival wraps up Tuesday night with the second annual Festival of Media Awards. The Canadian operations of both PHD and OMD are still in the running for glory that night after making the short list which was announced early last month.
OMD is nominated twice for the Doritos Guru campaign–a multi-media effort that asked consumers to name a new Doritos flavour–produced with a handful of partners including BBDO, Proximity, Fleishman-Hillard, and Capital C.
The campaign is nominated in the Best Communications Strategy and Best Consumer Driven Campaign categories.
PHD’s “Love Your Heart” benefit concert for Unilever’s Becel brand is nominated in the Best Communication/Entertainment Platform category, while Touche PHD is still in the running in the Best Communication Strategy category for Abrupt Endings, created along with partners Sid Lee and Astral Media, for Suicide Action Montreal.
The Festival of Media Awards were added to the Festival last year to “showcase creative and effective use of media, as well as media owner innovation.”
To ensure Marketing is delivering the freshest content straight from Valencia (via Jeff’s computer) the Daily will have a slightly different schedule on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, publishing just a little later in the morning, while Marketing Daily PM keeps its regular schedule.
Jeff will also follow up with more in-depth coverage of the Festival in the May 17 issue of the magazine.
