What does authenticity look like?

Date:          Wednesday 11 November 2015
Venue:       Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney
Room:        The Lighthouse Gallery
Agenda:     4pm Registration
                  4:30pm Keynote, Panel discussion and Q&A
                  6pm drinks and canapés reception

This event is brought to you by Mumbrella and Getty Images.

Event Description

Authenticity is a hot topic in marketing and advertising, and moved from a mere trend to an ongoing demand from brands by consumers to ‘be real’. The most successful campaigns are powerful because they are human and authentic. People connect with brands through stories that capture the essence of a specific human experience.

How does authenticity play out in the world of image-making and advertising, what are its signals, rules and formulas? What do the new heroes of marketing campaigns look like?

Join Getty Images Global Director of Creative Planning, Rebecca Swift, for an exploration of authenticity and how to portray it with visual content.

The keynote will be followed by a debate “Can a brand be truly authentic?”. Where does the need for authenticity in communications come from, and how can it be expressed? What stereotypes in advertising need to be broken in Australia?

Join Mumbrella and Getty Images for a fascinating evening of insights and conversations. We look forward to you joining with your questions and opinions.

Keynote Speaker

Rebecca Swift, Global Director of Creative Planning, iStock and Getty Images

Rebecca joined the photography industry nearly 20 years ago, and was one of the founding members of the creative research team at Getty Images, introducing the visual research methodology to the industry. Rebecca is now responsible for building image collections for content library iStockphoto. Day to day she works with photographer communities that range from the amateur hobbyists to highly successful professionals through events such as iStockalpse. Tasks include setting creative briefs, training photographers in legal issues and keywording and setting up practice photo shoots. She also runs global research projects looking at the future of visual communications and has published many trend reports. Rebecca also works as a visual consultant for global corporations who are building visual brands. She works with companies within a wide range of industries from the Charity sector to the Oil Industry and has presented findings all over the world. Rebecca lectures widely at conferences and seminars and has been a visiting lecturer at University of the Arts and UCLAN. She has sat on the judging panel for most of the significant European photography, design and advertising awards. She is currently researching a PhD into visual trends in UK advertising imagery over the last 30 years.

Panel Speakers

Nikki Lawson, Chief Marketing and Development Officer, YUM Brands

As Chief Marketing & Development Officer at KFC SOPAC based in Sydney, Nikki gets to exploit her passions for people, food and design on a daily basis and ensures that doing what she loves is what keeps her busy.  She has held the Brand role in Australia for over five years but her love affair with the Colonel started fifteen years ago in South Africa where she held various Marketing roles, the last three as Chief Marketing Officer for KFC Africa and where the brand was awarded Marketing Organisation of the Year. Nikki credits a lot of her Marketing foundations to her six years at Unilever but acknowledges that nothing can train you for the wealth of knowledge you gain through trial and error and physically executing. KFC is one of the few fabulous brands that still gets to create its own marketing locally and the volume of retail activity combined with the big brand building activities that she gets the pleasure to work on each year has shaped the brand builder she is today. More recently Nikki has had the privilege of working with a global team to help define the KFC global brand purpose, a project which has made her a passionate advocate on unlocking the truth of the brand and then using this to galvanise the organisation and build authentic connections with consumers.

Steve Coll, Chief Creative Officer, WiTH Collective

As CCO of WiTH Collective, Steve describes himself as very content person who’s also incredibly forgetful (and reckons the two are linked). As a keen swimmer though, Steve never forgets to find time for a dip, despite – or possibly because of – his fascination with sharks. Outside of his interest in swimming (and terrifying, ocean-dwelling predators), the Northern Irishman couldn’t live without his girls, Fleur, Lily and Poppy. He counts each of their births among the best days of his life – along with the day Manly beat Melbourne Storm in the 2008 Grand Final, the day he finally ‘got’ cricket, and the day he won the inaugural Cannes Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness.

Claire Salvetti, Managing Partner, One Green Bean