Day 2-Monday, June 20th
Monday was our first day attending the festival, and was the perfect beginning to what would be the most amazing week to follow.





10:30 am: Yielding Unapologetic Creativity Through "Collaborativity"
alma & Pepsi
The speakers at this talk were Todd Kaplan, the Chief Marketing Officer of Pepsi, and Luis Miguel Messianu, the Founder and Chairman of alma DBB. The two clearly have a great agency-client relationship, as they were bantering and having a great time discussing their work. Speaking of the agency-client relationship, they stated how they completely ditch that trope. Instead, they like to refer to themselves as "co-conspirators", which I thought was a cool way to look at it.
The problem at hand was that Pepsi needed to break into spaces where Pepsi isn't sold: McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King (the top burger chains in the country). Statistics showed that 60% of Americans preferred their burgers with a Pepsi.

The big idea was centered around finding the Pepsi logo hidden in the wrappers of these burger chains. However, due to legal issues since the chains ARE Coke carriers, they couldn't manipulate the images in any way. To execute the campaign, they hired an origami artist to carefully crinkle the paper in the exact way so that it would make a perfect Pepsi logo​​. This is so clever because it implies that Burger King for example is better with a Pepsi without directly saying it.
Overall, this was a really inspiring print campaign and awesome speaker dynamic to witness.
11:30 am: Meet Up-Cindy Gallop on Redesigning the Agency Model
Cindy Gallop
Before the festival, I had absolutely no idea who Cindy Gallop was. Now, I can confidently say I will never forget her! She is truly one of the most fiery, confident, inspiring people I've ever seen. Her talk was centered around the idea that the industry needs to stray away from rigidness and simply doing business transactions and start letting creativity flow and make meaningful bonds.
We did a group activity where everyone there broke up into groups of 6 (luckily there were exactly 6 of us who came together). We had 10 minutes to "form an agency" and answer the following questions:
1. How can we be more creative?
2. How can we make more money?
3. How can we be happy?
Our answers:
1. We can be more creative by letting everyone in the agency have a voice, implementing "speed dating" for ideas and bracketing down ideas with everyones input and reasoning.
2. We can make more money based on the 3 P's: passion produces profit. If we only take on jobs we are passionate about, we'll produce better work which will make us more money in the long run.
3. We can be happy by always respecting one another, always having Fridays off, having a mental health/wellness staff and being kind.
Overall this was a super interesting conversation because it was cool to see adults who are actually in the industry do this little exercise and hear their (sometimes satirical) answers.
12:30 pm: Master Your Mind-power
Meryl Blau
This inspiring talk was given by none other than our amazing teacher, Meryl Blau! She walked us through her journey with mental toughness and how it has impacted her life. We started out with an exercise: writing down a negative thought, and then crossing it out. Then, answering "what do I want instead?" This simple exercise is very impactful when it comes to how you view your own capabilities, and definitely left me feeling inspired. She also touched on the importance of taking control of your morning routine and setting up each and every day for success. Additionally, mastering your nutrition and being able to manage your stress in high pressure situations. The goal should always be to increase your productivity by 10x, and get into your creative flow, because that's when the magic happens! This presentation was so inspiring and I'm so proud of Blau, she killed it!
Fringe Event: Snapchat x Vogue: Redefining the Body
Snap Inc. & Vogue
In between talks at the Palais, we checked out the Snapchat x Vogue installation. This building caught my eye on the first day of the walking tour, as it was a beautiful building with a huge "Snapchat x Vogue" sign listing multiple designers.
The concept was making designer garments come to life virtually. Each room was decorated to go with the designer piece it was featuring, which produced some stunning layouts. However, I was a little unimpressed by the technology. One part of it was scanning an object with your snapchat and apparently it would come to life on your snapchat screen—it wouldn't work for me or my classmate and when I saw what it was supposed to look like I was underwhelmed anyways. The other part was just a camera that puts a filter of you wearing a (poorly rendered) virtual version of the designer outfit. The vibes were definitely cool and the idea was there but I think it would be a little hard to get excited about the virtual aspects they were displaying.
Something that was exciting was that we ran into David Dobrik on our way out.

Fringe Event: Meta Beach Reels
Meta
We took a stop at Meta Beach to check out an Instagram Reels installation by an artist that we had heard people talking about. We waited in line for forever only to be wildly underwhelmed (whoops). Meta Beach was awesome, but the Reels installation had the same idea as the Snapchat x Vogue—recording with your phone and having some sort of virtually rendered object appear. In this case it was chrome cubes that went along with the artwork and looked like they were floating around you. It was kind of cool, but the whole point of the installation was to get people to post Instagram reels, and quite frankly I would never ever post the video they took of us hahaha it was definitely "cheugy" and just kind of a miss for me. After that we cooled down and checked out the rest of Meta Beach which was great.

3:00 pm: Who's Gen Z, Really?
Spotify
Next we went to a discussion at Spotify Beach that was all about Gen Z. Spotify Beach was pretty awesome—we got free merch, rose, ice cream, and the views were great. The forum consisted of "Gen Z-ers" Ziad Ahmed, Founder and CEO of JUV Consulting, Kayla Suarez, Co-host of Teenager Therapy Podcast, and Thomas Pham, also Co-host of this Podcast. It was moderated by Dustee Jenkins, Global Head of Public Affairs at Spotify.
The main idea was that Gen Z differs from other generations because we are always listening, always trying to learn and always crave to be stimulated. Social media is almost a language unique to Gen Z-ers; for us it is first nature, for others it is a learned language. They discussed how Gen Z is particularly good at seeing through brands trying to sell them something. Another telling fact about Gen Z is that the most streamed podcast subject is mental health, which had a 16% increase from 2021-2022. The panel was presented with the question of where does Gen Z want to work? The answers were places that are kind and care about employees and humanitarian issues, won't give up on employees, nowhere with people we don't like, not a 9-5 desk job. Something that I thought was really cool was that they stated the current work model is young people LEARN not LEAD, but Gen Z completely challenges this. They discussed how we want to take the reigns and make an impact, and I think this is completely true.

4:00 pm: Rick and Morty - Breaking Boundaries in Every Way
Adult Swim
The speakers at this talk were the co-creators of Rick & Morty and the President and CEO of Cartoon Network & Adult Swim. The creator, Dan, discussed the origin story of the show: he was working on an NBC show called Community and wasn't a huge fan of it, always feeling like he might get fired. He had ideas for other shows, was inspired by Back to the Future and decided to give it a go. Halfway through the first season they were like "Hmmm, we got something that really works here". Dan was hilarious and discussed how he didn't like getting recognized or addressed at first because he felt he too was just a fan of the show. They discussed the identity of Rick & Morty fans, calling them "passionate fans of smart comedy". The creator says he thinks R&M is too big to fail now, even though it's hard with comedy not to be offensive sometimes since it doesn't always age well. But essentially, R&M is making fun of the human condition as a whole. They also discussed brand deals and how marketing is about the presence of the product not blatantly selling it—an example of this being an episode they did on Levi's jeans, which was hilarious. I don't even watch R&M and I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion.
We also had the pleasure of meeting up with UM alum Jason, who was in our teacher's class during his time at UM and is now producer on R&M. He told us about his whole career, and how it all started sitting in the same seats my classmates and I sit in in the University of Miami advertising program. Talking to him was very inspiring and interesting, I'm so grateful we had the opportunity to meet with him.
