UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 12 MARCH 2021
This month, Birmingham City University hosted the Forward 2022 conference, giving BA Digital Marketing, MA/MSc Future Media and Film Department students the opportunity to learn more about topical issues in the creative and digital marketing industries.
This year's virtual conference was organised by our Digital Marketing academics and was titled 'People vs Tech: Riding the tsunami of technologies and trends', featuring speakers from well-respected organisations such as McCann, BBC Creative, Power of Chi, Zemanta, GSK and Electric House.
Jasmine Watt and Georgia Parker from McCann opened the conference sharing their tips for graduates on how to break into the digital marketing industry, ‘At McCann we are lucky enough to be given a wide range of responsibilities early in our roles, so don’t feel like in order to get a good job in digital marketing you need to move to London'.
Next up was Lambros Charalambous from BBC Creative who spoke passionately about his personal experience and the importance of culture, diversity and collaboration in the workplace. ‘We have a huge responsibility to leave positive marks of culture around everything we do, this is why inclusivity is so important’, he reinforced.
Stela Braje from Zemanta and Kwai Chi from Power of Chi, followed with a discussion on the evolving creative and advertising technology sectors. Braje gave advice on navigating industries with an increasing availability of jobs by expressing a need for 'people who are not afraid to reinvent themselves'.
Dr Gregory Hough from GSK followed with a fascinating talk on innovation within retail experience through the integration of AR/VR technologies. 'Virtual stores enable us to test store layouts in real-time by a click of a button. This saves significant amounts of time as studies can be run concurrently', he explained. He framed these technologies as preferable to traditional shopper research which 'limits our possibility of understanding consumer preferences'.
Conference attendees then heard from the Co-Founders of Electric House, Lee Wilcox and Adam Barrie, who offered valuable tips on employability by sharing the problems they faced when starting out in the industry, 'At the start of 2016 we had to start over development of our app, we lost a big client and the vision of our brand got lost. We pushed through this, adapted and recently we hired our 100th employee... At the beginning we didn't know what we were doing, it's normal to feel out of depth'. Undoubtedly profound words for an audience of soon-to-be graduates!
Without a doubt, the focus of the conference meant there were many interesting discussions to be had, but what were students able to take away from it? This wasn't the first Forward conference for student, Manisha Chahal, who commented: 'It's always a great opportunity hearing from industry professionals and being able to get their insight on important topics and latest trends within the marketing world - they did not disappoint!'
Manisha said that the topic of diversity and navigating the industry as a minority is something that she feels very passionate about, being of Indian heritage, and she was encouraged by hearing some of the professionals speaking about their own experience during the conference: 'I'm glad that we are going in the right direction by continuing to educate and open the discussion about diversity in the creative industry. It was both refreshing and reassuring to hear Lambros Charalambous share his journey to a career in creative as an ethnic minority, going against cultural norms. Both Kwai and Lambros have inspired me to be brave and work hard as I embark on my journey after university'.
Follow the School of Games, Film and Animation on Twitter and Instagram to keep up to date.