Exciting and rich couple of days with a lot of smart people in Davos for the 4th edition of the World Communications Forum – it snowed almost uninterruptly and the thermometer on my phone said we had -15 °C but either I have become insensitive to cold, or the meteo site from where it read the temperature was bonkers.
The format of the event privileges the highest form of interactivity and the distinction between audience and stage is not always clear, with discussions started politely in english to fall back to russian or hindi when the going gets rough and the poor translators trying their best to cope; more than once we witnessed members of the audience or panelists come to the rescue providing impromptu help to the language impaired.
I participated in two panels and moderated another, so I can well say my time was well spent.
On the first one we discussed the alternative between local and global agencies; I was asked to the be the global agency advocate, which I was happy to do, even though some of the remarks of my opponent Arturas Jonkus from Lithuania made an awful lot of sense.
The second panel was rather an extended discussion around creativity and I contributed the case study of a small project we did for Bayer several years ago under the – hopefully – provocative title: When you can’t find your own creativity, steal someone else’s!
Finally, I moderated avery lively discussion with Casey Lau, the “Scoble of Asia”, and Vasily Gatov of RIA Novosti on Digital Reality, or the future of our personalities as they become increasingly shared online; for this I used – as a way of introduction to the topic – this presentation:
I am particularly proud of the level of interest stirred by the latter panel which, thanks to Casey and Vasily, dragged the whole audience in a heated debate stopped only by the fact we ran ut of time, but I am sure there will be more opportunities and desire to continue the discussion embracing Europe, Russia and Asia.
And, dare I say we (with Alfred Koblinger, Stuart Bruce and Juha Frey) capped the forum with an excellent swiss dinner based on fondue and raclette at Boccalino‘s?
Sounds like the kind of event you’d find entertaining and educational, my friend. I wonder, was there any talk of losing sight of communications (principles) in the ever expanding jungle of social media? Take care, rinze
more than you think; and there was, especially from many non directly socil media oriented participants a belief that SoMe brings an unavoidable push towards increased transparency.
Gianni, thanks for the recap. Agree it was time well spent. Love it that we really had interactive discussions and not just a series of presentations. And enjoyed the closing dinner too!