Thursday, August 7, 2008

We all got a little fresh this week

OMD Strategy Melbourne

After what seemed like endless months of planning, we finally had our maiden voyage into the world of event management with Think Fresh 08 kicking off in Sydney and Melbourne.We had the big guys in Sydney (Mark Coad) and Melbourne (Steve Sinha) ribbon cutting to let everyone know how important the area of fresh thinking is to OMD and how Think Fresh has been designed as a bigger launch pad for the year ahead.


Amantha Imber, Head Inventiologist at Inventium then gave a super duper energetic presentation on creativity. She ran a few live brainstorming exercises with the crowd and left everyone motivated and holding onto their very own 'creativity' glove to ensure no one lets their best ideas escape!

Our very own Kate Gunby, Head of Insights and Metrics then launched the OMD Innovation Bank. It's a compelling proposition to get clients to put their money where their mouth is and allocate 10% of their annual budgets to fresh ideas. That is, 9% to be allocated to running the ideas and 1% to measuring them. If we aren't making any calculated steps towards being brave with our future communications thinking.... we are sure to fail at reaping the big rewards.


Rob, OMD's National Strategy Director made a bold move at the Sydney session. After explaining the four areas of freshness that the OMD strategy team is focused on, he got the audience to allocate $100 across those areas. What was clear is that both clients and OMD staff are keen on Deliberately Thinking Differently in the year ahead so exciting challenges for us to get our tool box brimming for action with all our committed freshness partners.

Trudi, Head of Strategy in Melbourne wrapped up their session by revealing that the number of advertisers in Australia between Jan and June 08 was over 120k… Surely this is a motivation to get fresh and brave with our communications if you want to stand out. She then went on to bust a few myths around creativity and talk through action plans and suggestions for uniting our fresh thinking amongst OMD staff, our clients, our creative partners and media owners.

We're all looking forward to next week's event and in Melbourne we will also be launching the Gallery of Freshness and Bravery on Monday too.

For a copy of the presentations, drop us a line and we'll send you the goods...

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