The 3% Conference started as a passion project to highlight a huge business opportunity in advertising–the importance of more female creative directors to brands and agencies’ ability to connect with an overwhelmingly female marketplace. And you needn’t be a woman, or even in advertising, to see the value in attending. The 3% Conference has taken on a personality of it’s own and has exploded into a movement that includes road shows, research, a thriving social community and more.
India and China aren’t the New Economy. Women Are.
More and more companies are waking up to the she-change happening in the world, where women are out-educating and out-earning men, expected to control two-thirds of U.S. wealth within a decade, and influencing the majority of consumer spending across all industries.
Part of that new awareness is running a company that recruits, retains and promotes women and markets to female consumers with respect and intelligence. Ad agencies have an abysmal record of retaining female creative talent (only 3% of creative directors are women), and there are plenty of other industries where female leadership is stalled in single digits. Perhaps you work in one of them. If so, chances are you’ve come up against some of the challenges that The 3% Conference’s two-day agenda answers:
Lack of Mentorship
Our unique Speed Mentoring sessions pair senior leaders with mentees to ask and answer burning questions and forge meaningful, long-lasting connections. And our 97% Speak panel (comprised of 4 senior men in advertising) includes each man inviting one woman he has mentored on-stage to discuss how championing of women looks in practice.
Slow Innovation
Guy Kawasaki will share the stage with J. Walter Thompson’s Director of Trendspotting, Ann Mack, to talk about responsive web design, wearable devices, collaborative consumption and other trends that should be on every forward-thinking company’s radar. There will also be a panel of VCs and entrepreneurs, dedicated to Intrapreneurship – innovating within a larger organization. Additionally, IDEO’s Design Director, Jenn Maer, will talk about innovating your workplace itself to appeal to modern workers.
Clueless About Marketing to Women
There’s an old saying that “half my advertising budget is wasted, only I don’t know which half.” Today, 85% of your advertising budget is wasted if you don’t know how to market to women. We’ve got an all-star lineup – anchored by Marti Barletta — of panelists to share wisdom about green marketing, mom marketing, boomer marketing and the social good movement.
Not Using – or Misusing – Social Media
This is where my friend Shelly Kramer gets to shine, showing attendees how to Build Brands by Building Relationships, both on behalf of clients as well as on our own behalf via our personal brands. Shelly is the DO’s to Scott Stratten’s DON’Ts. Scott’s keynote “How QR Codes Kill Kittens” cautions us not to misuse location-based check-ins, QR codes, sponsored tweets and other new business tools.
There’s plenty more–with 75 speakers in total and over a dozen breakout sessions to choose from. Attendees are comprised of some 400 to 500 men and women from the worlds of advertising, non-profits, consumer brands, human resources and technology. Join us in San Francisco October 16-17. Tickets are available at www.3percentconf.com and you can use the code V3 to save 10% on your registration.
The 3% Conference: What, Why and Why You Should Not Miss It is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency
