Getting Creative at MARCOM 2013

As a proud partner of the MARCOM Professional Development Forum, Banfield-Seguin decided to bring added value to this year’s event by getting creative — quite literally. In collaboration with CEPSM, who produces the forum, we developed The Creative Spark Series, a collection of articles about creativity in the workplace.

Taking place on May 28-29, 2013 at the Ottawa Convention Centre, MARCOM is the premiere educational forum for public and not-for-profit sector marketers and communicators.

As part of our partnership, we also developed the theme design for MARCOM. The title of this year’s forum, Mission Possible: Change Agent, inspired us to create this look and feel, along with the tag line: Inspire, Influence, Act.

Demystifying creativity

The Creative Spark Series was designed to help demystify creativity in order to deal with change more effectively, and to redefine it as an open form of problem solving. We also wanted to make creativity accessible to all by providing strategies, tools and tactics that could apply to any workplace and sector.

Topics covered in the series have included The Benefits of Creative Work Cultures, Making the Most of Your Team’s Unique Creative Abilities,  What Highly Creative Workplaces Can Teach You, Tools and Techniques to Unlock Workplace Creativity, and Working With Creative Agencies.

The series will culminate in a Peer-2-Peer roundtable at the conference on how to “gamify” your work. Banfield-Seguin’s very own Christina Flavell, Director of Strategy, will lead the session.

“It all began when we first started working with MARCOM on this year’s theme creative as an Official Supplier to the forum.” explained Flavell. “Claire Mills (Vice-President of Professional Development at CEPSM) encouraged us to further demonstrate and showcase our creativity leading up to the forum. Together, we came up with a plan to provide MARCOM with content that would serve to increase engagement with the MARCOM community and drive more potential participants to the program to learn about its merits. And for us, it’s been a great chance to share what we have learned over the years and to further refine our own creative process.”

Spreading the word

To make the most of the series, Banfield-Seguin and MARCOM developed a distribution strategy that utilized our combined online channels, including blogs, newsletters, emails, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. One of our articles was also included in the April enewsletter from MARCOM partner IABC Ottawa.

Judging from the reception to the first few articles, it looks like we’re off to a great start! So far, The Creative Spark Series has garnered very positive feedback from MARCOM organizers and helped increase traffic to the www.marcom.ca website .

Banfield-Seguin wishes to thank Claire Mills for the opportunity to work together on such an inspiring project!