The calendar of mandatory industry gatherings, which seems to grow longer each year despite everyone's professed desire to spend less time in hotel ballrooms, is about to add another entry.
Adweek announced that its annual Brandweek summit will take place in Atlanta this September, promising to assemble what the trade publication described as "some of the most closely watched brand executives in the country." The event is aimed at senior marketers responsible for growth, relevance, and the perennial imperative of driving what the organizers called "real business results."
The sessions, according to Adweek, are designed to reveal strategies that attendees can "actually take back to work and use" — a formulation that suggests, perhaps inadvertently, that this has not always been the case at such gatherings.
(One does not typically advertise that the food at a restaurant is edible.)
The choice of Atlanta continues a pattern among marketing conferences of rotating through major American cities, each of which offers its own combination of convention facilities, direct flights, and local attractions suitable for networking dinners. Atlanta, home to the Coca-Cola Company and a substantial advertising community of its own, has hosted its share of industry events over the years.
The announcement offered few details about specific speakers or programming, though it promised that the executives in attendance would be engaged in "rewriting the brand playbook" — a phrase that has been applied to so many marketing initiatives over the past decade that the original playbook, whatever it contained, must by now be largely illegible.
Registration information was not immediately available. The conference is scheduled for September, which gives attendees several months to clear their calendars and prepare remarks about driving real business results.
Original story published in adweek.com: "The Marketers Rewriting the Brand Playbook Are Coming to Atlanta"