Creative Play Between sessions, C2-MTL participants got in touch with their inner child.
she sent to 50 female creatives at ad agencies, requesting their feedback on which items were of greatest interest to them — and who they thought should sponsor the event. It turned out that they ranked ad-agency sponsors really low — an “important data point” for Gordon, who realized that “if you’re going to get together and discuss an issue that’s so long overdue, and a lot of women have hurt feelings or bad stories around it, you almost don’t want to be hosted by an ad agency that day — where you feel like you’re kind of diss- ing the host. You want to be able to have complete honesty. And so that really led me to not even try to sell sponsorships to ad agencies.” Overall, Gordon said the feedback “was a
resounding yes — ‘Yes, this is needed.’ ‘Yes, I want to help.’ ‘Yes, I would come.’” She received helpful speaker recommendations as well. “That’s when I felt I had the green light to proceed,” she said.
GETTING THE WORD OUT
Gordon launched The 3% Conference website (3percentconf.com) this past February. “I put up a landing page immediately, and it was pretty crappy,” she said. “I was a little bit embarrassed. … When you’re trying to entice people in advertising
to come to an event, they have a pretty good design sensibility. But it was well written and it explained the premise of the event, and just allowed people to sign up for email. That was a way I could quickly capture and start building a database in advance of having a fully functioning website.”
CONFERENCE HOPPING Over the past year, Gordon made a point of attend- ing about eight conferences, and speaking at a few. “I felt it was almost my research assignment to kind of watch the mechanics of a conference, see what I thought made for a compelling conference, and see things I didn’t want to replicate at our event,” she said. She attended large conferences, such as BlogHer, with 6,000 attendees, as well as smaller meetings, to get a feel for what would be the appropriate number of attendees to aim for at this first-time event. “It was pretty much a stab in the dark,” she said. “I had been told that for a first- year conference, anything over 100 attendees is successful. So I set a big, audacious goal, and said, ‘Let’s do 200 people. I think that’s doable.’” As an active conference observer, Gordon had
two main takeaways for her own event. “I’m kind of introverted, and so going to a conference where