PPA Festival 2017 the Best one Yet

This year’s PPA Festival was the best one we’ve been to yet, and it really felt that the consensus was that this was the best one overall for everyone. Tobacco Dock was a great venue, albeit a bit hard to get to like many of the larger London venues.

Some of the highlights for us below in Tweets.

The first seminar we attended was by Bruce Daisley, Vice President for Twitter in Europe. His talk on the evolving office was great and highlighted that flexibility and close communication is key. Affino as a devolved virtual company takes this to the next level, so it was great to hear some of the science behind this.

The outstanding seminar of the day for me was the Snapchat / Cosmopolitan one lead by Farrah Storr and Claire Hodge. Exactly what I was looking for, lots of insight and great to hear how effective it has been for them. Coming on the day of SnapChat’s mediocre financial results, left me with a very positive impression of their potential.

The Independent Publisher chat is always a good session. Could have been a little bit better moderated but was great to hear the different points of view, and particularly good to hear from Dan Pearce of TTG Media who are great Affino users.

One of our personal highlights was the great Cover Photo Shoot organised by the PPA and Martin Ixer Design. Great fun and a really nice and professional team.

Here’s my Empire cover:

And JC’s Campaign cover:

There was a great VR / AR stand and I got to try out Microsoft’s HoloLens. Can’t wait for this to get a little bit more evolved. Will try and wear it more stylishly next time. Was interesting that it struggled a little bit when the room got busy.

Lots of other nice highlights, including meeting quite a few of our clients and familiar faces. The catering was also excellent this year with the ice cream cart, great coffee and a large number of food stands.

Altogether a very worthwhile experience and a must for next year.