As seen by Marius Marin, Reputation Manager @ Minio Studio!

Every conference comes with its pluses and minuses, but the most important thing is to manage to pay enough attention to be able to internalize all that information that you will surely need in your daily work. And if you haven’t gotten to any of them, don’t worry: I’ve gotten to several this year and I can’t wait to tell you about each one!

Big Idea Conference

The Big Idea Conference is all about what’s new in marketing and advertising. For one day, some of Romania’s best-known creatives and managers of respected brands came together to share new ideas, relevant experiences and tactics that work. This is the first event since 2022 that I attended. In fact, it was also the first edition of the event.

What caught my attention:

• the iSense Solutions study on Romanians’ TV consumption (presentation by Laura Rosca), from which we learned that in 2022, TV remains the most relevant channel for ads, that 73% of consumers change the channel during ad breaks (compared to 78% in 2016), the main reason given by respondents being that there are too many ads (49% of them said this); Compared to 2016, the percentage of those who play games during ads has also increased, both on their phone (31% vs. 22% in 2016) and on desktop (32% vs. 22% in 2016); also notable is the increase in those who buy things during ad breaks, 13% from smartphone (up 11% from 6 years ago) and 21% from desktop (up 16% from the same period);
• the series of activations presented by Glo, under their “Rebels with a Cause” concept;
• Starcom’s Andrea Lupu’s presentation on “reshaping advertising strategies“, that in 2022 advertising should be more than that: it should be a response to social change, it should be more connected to society and the context in which we live, to people’s needs and problems.

Presentations from the Big Idea Conference can be seen HERE.

PR & Communication Summit

This is an event dedicated to communication and public relations, being an area of great interest for me to see what are the latest trends and perspectives in communication.

What caught my attention:

• GMP PR’s Ioana Mănoiu’s presentation about Metaverse and the entry of global brands into the virtual universe;
• the debate about how the pandemic was for us as people working in agencies, how we felt, how we worked and what matters most now;
• case studies presented by Golin and GRF+ about some of their campaigns and how they used the PR component, e.g.: Casa Niță, Fairo, Fairy.

Presentations from the Big Idea Conference can be seen AICI.

Social Media Summer Camp by Biz

This was my first participation in a Social Media camp. I was together with Teodora Mihale, Account Manager at the agency. The camp has a mix of learning, networking and fun. During the three days, we participated in a series of conferences, workshops and themed parties.

What caught my attention:

• presentations of influencers as guest speakers, including Aluziva, Mimi, Emil Rengle, Edi Brandabura: about who they are online, SM best practices and content strategies;
  
• the debate between short content (by Aluziva, Louis Florea and Emil Rengle) and long content (by Manafu, Gojira and Radu Constantin),
• the workshop on briefs, where we were all divided into teams and assigned a brand and a campaign brief to solve. I was in the 5 To Go team, and the challenge was to promote coffee cups from the Retro Grand collection, correlated with music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s and having a partnership with Radio Guerilla. It was really exciting – because it came as a real challenge, just like in the agency, and because we teamed up with various people we hadn’t worked with in this format before. And our presentations were reviewed by a jury made up of Cristian Manafu, Mihai Bonca and Mugur Pătrașcu;
• the theme parties (obviously): latino, la dolce vita, rebels with a cause, where we “worked” as a team and had a lot of fun.

Aftermovie of the SM Summer Camp HERE.

VisualFest

VisualFest is dedicated to visual communication, a meeting place for content creators and brands interested in the current trends in Social Media. Every year, creatives, influencers and specialists come together to present their strategies and experiences in visual content creation.

What caught my attention:

• discussions and debates in different formats and on different topics, such as: the discussion about photography and photo content between Cristian Vasile and Mihnea Ratte; the one between Andreea Balaban and Mara Coman about beautified visual content and the whole process behind it; the one between Andreea Retea and Georgiana & Marian (Mariciu) Ionescu – beyond being a family, they are also a team online;
• presentations by Andreea Retinschi (fotograf & content creator), Alexandra Mircea (dentist & content creator) and Graure (sneaker artist & content creator) on how they think about visual content, how they relate to it in their posts and how they each create it for their audience;
• trends and the big 4 in Social Media (YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram), presented by Cristian Manafu.

The VisualFest speakers’ presentations can be seen HERE.

Influencer Marketing Conference

It is an event entirely dedicated to influencer marketing – news in the influencer marketing industry, the collaborative relationship between influencers and brands, case studies of work with influencers (e.g. Samsung and Pepsi at this year’s edition) and presentations by influencers themselves (e.g. Lorenei Serban reporting on TikTok and what it’s like to be an influencer on this platform).

At this year’s edition, I participated with my colleagues Patricia Bălan – Social Media Executive and Răzvan Sarivan – Digital Account Manager at Minio.

What caught my attention:

• news presented by Andreea Lupu and Andreea Zanfir about the power of influence and new data as part of the Starcom InfluenceMe study about influencer marketing in Romania in 2022 and the continuing evolution of the field. 2022 was also the year with the most campaigns with influencers;
• case studies presented by Samsung and Pepsi on how they choose their influencers in the campaign, how they involve them, how they have strengthened relationships with them and have long-term collaborations. Samsung Romania has even formed #TeamGalaxy, a community that includes over 50 influencers that they activate depending on the campaign, the product, the objectives;
• the information presented by Ana Maria Udriște from Avocatoo from a legal & juridical perspective of some aspects related to collaborations with influencers: collaboration contract, respect of deliverables, transfer of image rights, exclusivity in the campaign, responsibility for content.

Presentations from the Influencer Marketing Conference can be viewed HERE.

Webstock Conference

Even though the event has been going on for several years, this is the first year I have participated in Webstock – the biggest Social Media and online communication event in Romania.

I attended the event together with my colleagues Vlad Boerașu – Creative Strategist and Răzvan Sarivan – Digital Account Manager in the agency. At the same time, at this year’s edition, Ioana Mucenic – CEO Minio gave a presentation about campaigns with Gen Z, exemplifying with case studies about campaigns implemented by us, such as Creative Chaos, #SkinChat by CeraVe and BAT Internship Finance.

What caught my attention:

• discussion about the evolution of Social Media platforms in Romania, especially the explosive growth of TikTok;
• Social Media strategies applied and the use of social networks in online campaigns, presented in different cases;
• case studies on campaigns implemented by brands, e.g. Fashion Days, Glo, Spotify.

After the conference I also participated with a large part of the agency in the Webstock Awards, where this year Minio had 8 nominations, both for internal projects “Creative Chaos” and “Minio Content HUB“, but also for campaigns realized with clients Hill’s Pet Nutrition, BAT, SAMAS Association, CeraVe, Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

You can see HERE the aftermovie from the Webstock conference and HERE the aftermovie from the Webstock Awards Gala.

Food Bloggers Conference – Winter Edition

The Food Bloggers Conference is the event for all those passionate about cooking and blogging alike, bringing together food bloggers, food journalists and photographers, specialists and well-known brands in the industry.

Also for the first time at this event, I was there more as an observer – to see what’s being discussed about food content, what the trends are and what activations brands in the industry are still doing. In the meantime, my colleague Ruxandra Custură, Account Manager at Minio, also came to the event.

What caught my attention:

• Eat Share Love debate between food content creators Gabriela Dima, Miruna Lică (FooDiva), Andreea Duția and Amelia Ciurică & Maria Lupu (Cosânzele Gătesc);
• live cooking moment on stage by chef Liviu Lambrino;
• increased public interest in video recipes, with watch time on recipe videos increasing 2.5 times in the last 2 years (according to Think with Google). We found that on TikTok, for example, there are over 3 million users interested in food and over 1 million interested in recipes.

You can watch HERE how it went at the Winter Food Bloggers Conference in 2022.

Go for it

This would be Marius’ advice to you. Every event, be it more niche or generalist, comes with learnings and the opportunity to make connections with industry specialists and, of course, practices that you can take into account in your daily projects. So do your research and your list of events of interest, according to your criteria, and go to those events that tick as many of the topics you care about as possible.