It’s Not About Then, It’s About Now

The annual PromaxBDA conference is the largest entertainment marketing, promotion and design event in the world and attracts execs from top television networks, cable channels, media and creative agencies, design and emerging media and other industry leaders. PromaxBDA was held in late June in LA and it is, without question, an awesome conference. I went to the conference when it was held in Miami several years ago – and I wish I could have made it to this one. It’s always a gathering of some of the best strategists, marketers and true thought leaders in the creative fields.

This video features a snippet from a panel on inspiration, and what inspires leaders in the field. Moderated by Will Travis, Dentsu America, the panel included people like David Carson, David Carson Design; Timothy Fisher, CoFounder, Mk12; Mark Kudsi, Director, Motion Theory; Jakob Trollback, Trollback+Company; Garson Yu, President and Creative Director for yU+Co, along with several others.

I found their thoughts and challenges inspiring and thought you might, too. Under the jump, there’s a recap of some of their comments, in case you want to roll them around in your head like I did in mind.

Will Travis opens the clip talking about change and what scares him. He was challenged by having a big shop, one that helped change the way things were done in the industry – and what comes after that. “You can’t rely on your heritage, on who you were” he says. “It’s about who you are going to be – and how you are reforming that“ that matters now.

And then Trollback wonders, with the advent of the Internet and the fact that sources of inspiration now are so accessible, “are we better, because of that?” And he elaborates that it’s that process – the transformation of one piece of inspiration into another – that drives all of us.

“There is no control over quality anymore” when you put your creative work out there to the public, says Mark Kudsi from Motion Theory. “You lose the details that you put into something.” But then, sometimes, it’s so great to see what the public does when they see a message that you created, and it’s interesting to see how they modify it to suit their own message or their own needs.

David Carson talks about the fact that everybody is influenced by some thing or some body and says “the trick (as a designer) is to take what got you into this field and make it your own.” I like that. And he mentions the creative’s perpetual lament “the tighter the boundaries imposed by a client, the harder it is” to deliver something that will really work for them. Alas. If only clients really understood that.

Bottom line, PromaxBDA is on my list of conferences I should attend whenever I can. It would be great to see you there, too.