South Africa’s inaugural comprehensive content marketing conference, held in the last week of February, was a confirmed success that played to full houses on both days, and saw major action on Twitter as online conversations trended on the first day.
Conference presentations comprised the views and work of some of our top local players like Thierry Cassuto of the film, television and digital content production company Both Worlds and executive producer and co-creator of the satirical puppet news programme ZANEWS; Mike Sharman of Retroviral Digital communications; Sam Wilson of Woolworths; Alistair King of the King James group; Glenn Gillis of Seamonster Entertainment and Zibusiso Mkhwanazi of Avatar.
“It was the opinions, conversation and debate between the speakers and delegates that made Content 2013 such a highly regarded and talked about event,’ says head of the conference’s organising committee Heléne Lindsay. ‘We set out to get people from different spheres talking about the whole story of connecting brands with their markets and now this conversation has started, we hope that it will continue.”
The BrandsEye infographic below shows the 1316 online conversations that took place over the two days – resulting in over 2 million opportunities to see.
Content Practitioner, Jacqueline Freer (@inrichmint) tweeted: ‘Thank you to the #content2013 organisers and DMMA for giving me the opportunity to have shared the past 2 days with awesome people and minds’. Animator Jade Mathieson (@JadeMathieson) tweeted: ‘Great to hear so many strong voices speaking up about the importance of good story-telling in media. Would definitely go again’.
The conference attracted across-the-board industry players including high-level specialists like Lani Carstens, MD of John Brown. “I felt the calibre of speakers was excellent. Alistair King was inspiring and thought-provoking and Relly Annet-Baker (a.k.a. blue content fairy) was quirky and enthralling. I think a conference of this nature is important to establish the power and importance of content marketing in South Africa. My hope is that going forward other key players can add strategic value to the conference line-up and even the formation of a regulatory industry body that we can all draw insights from,” she said
Uno de Waal, publisher of the website Between 10 and 5, said it was ” important for the industry to meet the players and people currently doing great work. Often content marketers operate in silos without seeing the broader picture. Conferences like Content2013 help to bring everyone out of the woodwork and meet over common interests.”
The speakers from the UK (Julia Hutchison, Eve Williams and Relly Annett-Baker) gave a powerful international viewpoint and a wonderful depth to the discussions and debate.
Content 2013 was funded by Paarl Media, organized by New Media and communicated in partnership with MANGO-OMC, Bizcommunity and Memeburn.
