ON THE WEB For more information about C2-MTL, visit c2mtl.com. For video highlights from the conference, visit convn.org/ c2-MTL12.
from local universities) served as “personal con- cierges” who offered a variety of services — from restaurant recommendations to helping partici- pants submit “burning questions” that multidis- ciplinary panelists would select to address during specific sessions.
GIVING BACK
Before and during the three-day conference, a multidisciplinary team — a copywriter, an art director, a creative technologist, an architect, and industrial and graphic designers — brainstormed about ways to raise awareness and funding for
The 3% Conference San Francisco
Sept. 27
RED, a global nonprofit dedicated to eradicating the transmission of HIV from mothers to their babies. The team presented a social-media cam- paign proposal to RED’s CEO on stage as one of C2-MTL’s final sessions.
Bouchard called the inaugural C2-MTL “a test
drive,” noting that Sid Lee Entertainment, a joint venture with Cirque du Soleil, is contemplating hosting C2 in one additional city in the world, in addition to its return engagement in Montreal next May. “We want this to happen every year,” Bouchard said. “Maybe twice.”
ATTENDEES
Several hundred agency owners, creative directors, and creative recruiters
GENESIS Working as a creative at large ad agencies, The 3% Conference’s founder, Kat Gordon, was disheartened by the absence of women in senior leadership positions. Indeed, of all the creative directors at North American ad agencies, only 3 percent are women (hence the conference name). Gordon cites a study in which 90 percent of female consumer respondents — who represent the majority of purchasers — said they felt that advertisers do not understand them. The 3% Conference is intended to remedy “this age-old problem.”
SPEAKERS Advertising agency leaders and academics
In retrospect, Kat Gordon, who owns Maternal Instinct, a Palo Alto–based agency focused on marketing to mothers, thinks it’s “crazy” that she’s spent the last year organizing a brand-new conference. After all, she said, “I can barely host a dinner party.” But she hasn’t let her lack of event- organizing skills stop her. “Maybe there are other people like me out there
that don’t think of themselves as a conference plan- ner, but as a thought leader, or a visionary, or some- body that has something to contribute,” she said. “I think an event is a great way to mobilize people around an issue. The things that gave me pause about doing [this conference] were the things that I’m not good at, but you can outsource those. You don’t have to be good at everything. You just have to have the vision and be able to bring together the right group of people to make it a compelling event.”
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Here’s how Gordon conceived of and planned out her vision:
IT STARTED AT A CONFERENCE Holding a conference to address the paucity of female creative directors was something Gor- don thought about for several years before she articulated it. That happened in a very public way two summers ago, when she spoke at the 140 Characters Conference in San Francisco on “the snowballing power of the female consumer, and what companies were doing wrong to connect with her,” she said. “One of [which] was not having enough women on their account at their ad agency. So the night before I gave my talk at that confer- ence, I thought, ‘You know what, I’m just going to announce this conference, and see what happens.’” Which she did, saying at the end of her 140 Characters presentation: “And a new conference is being generated to address this, called The 3% Conference.” She’d created a Twitter handle (@3percentconf) that morning. “It was kind of like, let’s just see if there is interest,” Gordon said. “A lot of people responded to that initial tweet from that conference about this other conference. And that started the ball rolling.”
BUSINESS PLAN Gordon didn’t want to bring people together “and just have it be a great fest,” she said. “I wanted it to be a problem-solving event. I spent a lot of time reading online and discovered some really good papers written by some academics … on the differ- ent issues facing women in advertising.” Gordon’s copywriting skills came in handy as she developed a questionnaire, which in June 2011