Posted by: Khalidah El Mufleh

Last week, I attended the second IAA Conference under the theme "Out of the Box"; I had a blast in these couple of days and met so many exciting people. Speakers were suitably chosen and the event was excellently executed.

Zeid Nasser hosted the vent and did a great job; I really believe that media runs in his vines and I admire his dedication and hard work. Not only the event was professional, but it was so much fun during sessions, in between and after.

The first day started off with a great presentation designed by Intermarkets, and Wunderman; Media Plus did the animation. I found the idea innovative and creative. As Queen's "I want to break free" famous song started to play in the background, faces of great innovators from old and modern history were shaped with the sentence "Box Breaker" and were shown in sequence to put the viewer in an ignition mode ready to blast off in this innovative journey we were about to take.

Picture of Pablo Picasso

Faces of Charlie Chaplin, Jibran Khalil Jibran, Um Kolthoum, Bill Gates, Gandhi, Elvis Presley, Mohammed Ali, Ibn Sina, Taha Hussein, Alfred Hitchcock, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein and others were the buds that blossomed later on into a couple of days full of knowledge and excitement.

Speakers of this event were entrepreneurs who have great success stories up their sleeves and were generous and transparent enough to share them with everyone attending the event. One session after the other, presentations going into details and case studies of this world we call media, new trends and technologies were discussed and their values were emphasized to show their effect on advertising and brands' recognition, hence; success and profitability.

3 or 4 guys kept circulating among attendees with this great message

During the networking sessions that the conference organizers were keen on providing, I had a fair chance to interact with great people in the Advertising sector in Jordan and at the same time thank the speakers for their efforts and presentations. After the first session of the second day and as we stepped out of the room were the sessions were held; we were faced with a big white box with a picture of a guy who seemed to have broken the box and gotten out. The purpose of this box was to emphasize the idea of the whole event and to give us (attendees) a chance to express something by writing on the walls of the box. Shown below are pictures of the box after people poured their minds on it. My sentence was: To jump ahead, you need to take two steps backwards; get out of your own box!

From the new advertising mediums and means that were discussed and focused on are the blogs. The most important feature that blogs have is the fact that they are personalized which makes their content more credible to readers especially if they know the blog owner. Word of mouth was and still is a reliable and trusted means of advertising and promotion; it has become more sophisticated and now you don’t have to hear it from someone's mouth to believe it; all you need to do is read it on their blog and the message has been successfully passed.

This was discussed in the presentations talking about the issue and during the assigned Q and A sessions.

Picture of the Stage

Picture of the event sponsors

The conference was brought to an end with an innovative idea of transforming the audience into a jury; we were shown 22 different TV commercials and were asked to give each a rating between 0-10. Then we were asked to vote the best three for golden, silver and bronze prizes. The results of the voting were as follows:

Bronze goes to: Canal+ - March of the Emperor Ad

Silver goes to: Budweiser Beer – Stadium Ad

Golden goes to: Carlton Draught Beer – Big Ad

Click on the links above to view the ads.

In my opinion; this was a great ending to a great couple of days!