I’ve become conscious that I’ve not written much on this blog about Arts Marketing for while.
A few reasons really – firstly we had an incredibly tragic death in the family (so blogging about work didn’t seem that necessary), secondly I’ve been feeling like I’m drowning at work much of the time so the necessary motivation to get home after 9 – 11 hours at work and write some more about my job felt like something that might push me over the edge, and finally, and frankly, I’ve had a few months of feeling like, well, that I have nothing useful to say (I still feel like that – it’s why I’ll never be a consultant – and also paradoxically why I’d probably make a great consultant).
So why now?
Well I’m going to the AMA Conference in Newcastle for the first time in 3 years and I find myself thinking about what I want to get from it in advance – apart from a massive hangover, multiple fried breakfasts and at least one person drunkenly telling me how they want to cause violent harm to their CEO/AD (delete as applicable) because their CEO/AD (delete as applicable) has a objectional opinion about something that’s “JUST PLAIN FUCKING WRONG”.
Ahem.
Anyway, in the past I’ve been very critical of the AMA Conferences (I’d go so far as to say, being a bit of a twat about them – read here), so I thought I should at least put down what I want to get out of it now so that if I end up writing how unfulfilled I feel then we can easily see that its largely my overly demanding expectations rather that the conference itself (which is run by some very lovely, talented, genuine and insightful people – please don’t hurt me) – so here goes with the list:
Data
I’d like to have some interesting conversations on how people are collating, visualising and decypering data. As I’ve written about here and here I’ve been doing bits and pieces with Tableau (I’d love to compare with what other people have made..) for a while as well as having a few extra things I’ve made in excel for deal creation. If there were also conversations around how people have practically used Audience Finder and had successes that’d be amazing too!
Tiredness/Relentlessness
It’d be lovely to talk about how people deal with the work life balance thing. Particularly with venues who are producing and receiving. I had a conversation about 18 months ago about thinking about what we “stop doing” – it never really progressed, it’d be fascinating to discover if anyone has “stopped doing”?
Cool Things
Is anyone trying any new cool stuff? I’m conscious that as I get older and my work gets further consumed by budgets, invoices and tracking that I no longer seem to spot the random cool things (in part this is another reason for going to the AMA conference). So what are the twitters of tomorrow, the facebooks of the future, the instagrams of the instant?