A few weeks ago I had the chance to head back to Athens, Greece, for the second annual Stream Unconference, hosted by WPP Digital. I had a chance to discuss our Marketing with Meaning concept with a diverse group of client and agency leaders in the front lines of new marketing, and I came away with some great feedback and examples.

The overall concept of an unconference is outstanding. Usually business conferences are stuffy, boring, and full of people who paid extra to get a chance to speak about their new product or service. But this format was completely different. Instead of a strict agenda set by conference organizers, Stream had a big board with room/time slots that people selected to host any kind of discussion they wanted. You can see this in the photo above. This encourages people to take risks and invites a ton of valuable, democratic discussion.

Last year I shared our Marketing with Meaning concept at this event. It was really the first time that we had gotten public feedback on this point of view. This year I decided to present it again, since there were a lot of new people. But I also had some new wrinkles that I wanted to test out. Luckily, it went very well. My room was full at 9 a.m. and people were very interested and engaged. I learned a few things, such as when a person from Ogilvy let me know that Dove’s Evolution video had received 250 million views (and counting).  And I collected a handful of case studies that I will be featuring here and in our upcoming book.

Although I brought slides, the most valuable part of the session was the discussions it spawned. One of the new wrinkles I brought up was that meaningful marketing programs are less about mass scale and more about close connections with a smaller, more profitable base. People were surprised to hear, for example, that Nike+ only has 250,000 members who have run more than 100 miles. We also talked about the critical need to find clients who are willing to take the risk of moving from interruption to meaning. And because a lot of agency people were in the room, the conversation went to how we need to change our business models to adjust to these kinds of programs.

Everytime I present Marketing with Meaning I am encouraged to see faces light up and minds come alive.  People are getting it, and it’s getting them excited. On we go!