Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 about Agencies on Friday 11th March

Your meetings are stale, remote, and awkward conversations. You know you rock, but not everyone in your meetings is rocking to the same tune. Sometimes you aren't even sure you are in the same rock band anymore.

After having one too many unproductive (and occasionally sleepy) meetings, Happy Cog reinvented it's approach to meeting design around interactive activities, informed conversation, and collaborative design exercises. Happy Cog’s Experience Director Kevin M. Hoffman will review the key ideas from the history of meeting design and good facilitiation, then explore approaches for meetings that have proven engaging and successful to Happy Cog clients.

This talk will cover business strategy and project definition activities, conflict resolution processes, big group/small group conversation management, simple research engagements, deliverable presentations, and finally, post mortems. Many expamples will be pulled from Happy Cog's meeting approaches for clients like ecommerce (Zappos, Groupon), tourism (VisitPhilly.com), higher education (Georgetown University, MICA), and museums (the National Holocaust Museum).

LEVEL: Beginner

Now that digital and mobile is a component of any innovative ad campaign, the question arises: How much do marketers need to know about technology? The truth is, advertisers and brand marketers are entering a brave new world -- one where code is on par with content. The 21st-century ad isn't something to be looked at, it's something to be used. Our reliance on mobile tools, such as apps, position them as the perfect vehicles for brands. "Consumers" are now "users." So are "marketers" now "developers"?

Enter the hybrid marketer. More and more agencies are finding they need to educate and cultivate a new breed of people who understand tech from a marketing and brand perspective, and who have a consumer mindset. These creative technologists also lend a software company vibe around an agency.

But should agencies really try this stuff at home? Should they be worrying about, say, the video capability of the latest iPhone? Or just stick to their core competencies and work with real software companies and development shops to realize their ideas? This panel will look at this new staffing paradigm and debate what the agency of the future should look like.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Industry All-Stars tackle the subject that we're all most curious about but causes us the most discomfort: what, when, and how to charge for our work. Learn their inside tips on how to charge your clients, when trading work for equity makes sense, and how to avoid common client pitfalls. Stop cheating yourself and learn that you deserve to be paid in full for doing work you're passionate about. Our work has the power to make enormous amounts of money for our clients. Let's take a good hard look at the value we provide and how to ask for and receive value in return.

Negotiating your rate for a project is the difference between being a starving artist or successful freelancer or studio. Creatives fall prey to lowball offers, promises of future work, and other forms of wage penalties in fear of losing a potential client. Learn how the pros have created successful freelance businesses and startups by not compromising their rates and standards. Understand how they attract the big name clients and avoid the bad clients.
We'll also explore potential benefits and risks of working for stock.

Lawyers, doctors, accountants and other professionals typically don't experience angst, guilt, or wishy-washy boundaries when stating their rates and neither should we. We see standard billing rates across many industries. We’ll take a look at the role a standard billing rate would have in the creative services industry and how such a standard would be upheld and implemented.

LEVEL: Intermediate