Soho, on a Thursday night, quivers with anticipation for the weekend ahead – it’s loud and it’s brash and all those in its vicinity have one eye on a large glass of pinot noir. And to be quite frank with you, the delightful Adam Harper and I had similar designs last week as we made our way to the BMC Converge event on Greek Street. Not that it was just free booze on our agenda, you understand – we were also itching to see agencies including Stein IAS, OgilvyOne Business and Omobono give us the inside track on their creative process and big ideas.
A bit of background: the BMC is about to have a rebrand, and last year invited a number of the biggest players in agency-land to pitch their rebrand ideas (in front of each other). While we would have jumped at the chance to see that in action, last night was about cherry-picking the best bits from each pitch and hearing from account and creative directors alike about their take on the rebrand idea in question.
Glass of wine in hand, we saw a clever play on words from OgilvyOne Business, a confident focus on the importance of ‘club’ over ‘collective’ from The Marketing Practice and fresh perspectives on design from Omobono. For someone who’s only been working in B2B for 10 months, it was super interesting to get a glimpse of agency inner workings – we’re often privy to the nuances of winning campaigns but hearing how agencies get from A to B with their creative ideas and strategies was eye-opening.
The agency that stood out on the night (although we loved the OgilvyOne Business presentation) was Stein IAS with their winning ‘c-word’ campaign, which was both provocative and bold. ‘Don’t work for c-words all your life,’ they urge – referring, of course, to business-to-consumer land and its pesky marketers. What they’re doing is drawing a line in the sand and clearly setting B2B apart from B2C, emphasising exactly why B2B is such a great place to work.
With this idea they manage to chime in perfectly with the BMC’s vision for its own future. The Business Marketing Club (or Collective, as it was previously known) is all about bringing the world of B2B agency and client-side marketers together; it’s about being proud of the work that goes on in B2B and having a place to share and celebrate it. I for one am looking forward to seeing Stein IAS’s rebrand swing into motion in the coming months and will definitely be attending the next BMC event in March – and not just for the free wine…