Category: Personal Note

The American Advertising Federation (AAF) – District 10 invited me to speak at its winter conference, which took place Jan. 27-29 in Austin, Texas and was called “Austin Rocks.” My break-out session presentation on Day 2 was about how to recruit and work with young professionals in local AAF clubs.

My qualifications for being asked to speak were based on my current role on the executive board for Ad 2 National, the young professionals (18-32) version of AAF, and that I was the past president of Ad 2 Madison. For an hour I discussed the YP demographic, branding strategies, messaging, outreach, encouraging participation, programming, mentorship and retention ideas.

However, what I really wanted to talk about in this blog post was how well organized the conference was. The AAF – Austin and Ad 2 Austin folks did a great job securing sponsorships (including tons of raffle prizes), booking great speakers (including the founder of Gowalla), planning social events (e.g. hospitality suites each night and a bar crawl on Saturday) and handling logistics (e.g. they picked up speakers from the airport).

Plus, the program and website they created were AMAZING! I really enjoyed meeting so many great professionals from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, even though we couldn’t understand each other through our regional accents (j/k). I look forward to re-acquainting with them at the AAF national conference in June.

One last thought: despite an emphasis on social media topics, I was surprised that hardly anyone from the conference tweeted using the hashtags #AustinRocks or #AustinRocks2011.