There were two major industry events this week here in MN, back to back.  On Monday the AICP had their annual showing of the MOMA “Art & Technique of the American Commercial” reel.  And then on Tuesday and Wednesday the annual MIMA Summit was held (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association / mima.org).

The best thing about the AICP show was the afternoon program devoted to the “Next Awards”.  I would encourage everyone to attend if possible.  Unlike the traditional MOMA reel, which just shows the work that has been selected, the Next program featured commentary by various industry bigwigs about the emerging trends in all of the categories.  Plus the winners themselves were represented by detailed case studies, so you got a good understanding of the thinking that went into them and the technology that was applied to pull them off.  Very cool stuff, some of which I hadn’t seen before, and I learned a lot.

Highlights from the Next Awards included:

Nike “Write The Future” campaign

Target “Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular”

Old Spice “Smell Like A Man” campaign

Gatorade “Replay, Season 2”

The Johnny Cash Project

All of these are well worth checking out if you haven’t seen them.  Some of the material is posted under the “show archives” section of the AICP show web site (http://www.aicpshow.com/), and the commentary can be found on YouTube ()

I did not attend the first half-day of the MIMA Summit, but went to the full day program on Wednesday.  There were 10 different tracks that had presentations for each of the 4 sessions, so everyone’s experience was a little different.  For me, the highlight was the early morning keynote from Avinash Kaushik (http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/).  Avinash is a passionate evangelist for web analytics, and the author of two books on the subject.  And he is also quite funny.

He had done his homework before coming to Minneapolis, and had numerous examples of terrible web marketing from some of our biggest home-town companies.  He was especially derisive in his remarks about some web coupon offers from General Mills (deservedly so).  He also pointed out how lame many of the sites were when accessed by mobile devices, sometimes not showing up at all (in the case of Flash-based sites viewed on an ipad).  I think by now, everyone involved in web-based commerce should know that they need a mobile-optimized HTML5 version of their site available, and the technology to detect the user’s operating system.

He was complimentary of some of the Target sites, so they escaped unscathed.  He was quite funny overall, which helped a talk about web analytics at 8 AM, and I will share two of his home made acronyms as example:

HITS + How Idiots Tabulate Success

HIPPO + Highest Paid Person’s Opinion

The other session I saw that was great was Edward Boches (http://edwardboches.com/) and David Amano(http://darmano.typepad.com/) talking about the challenges in creating Innovation within a Traditional Agency environment (of which there are many).  They had an amusing “therapy” approach and invited anyone with a problem with their Agency to join them on a couch to get their advice.

Of course, both events were followed by cocktail parties, so much schmoozing and merriment was had by all.  And I got to see a lot of folks that I hadn’t seen in a long time at the AICP party.  Which, as the saying goes, didn’t suck.