New Year Outlook: 2024

We are proud to be hosting our 4th annual Virtual Agency New Business Conference.  The event gets bigger and better each and every year!

This year we are excited to welcome Julia Doria, the CMO of Bellevue University and former CMO of Bailey Lauerman as our Keynote Speaker. Julia’s senior level experiences on both the marketer and the agency side of the world should be insightful and inspirational for all the small-to-mid-size firms attending the conference.

We are also excited to be hosting three great panels. One is a senior level marketing panel that will be dedicated to helping marketing agencies better their relationship with current clients and improve their chances of breaking through to marketing prospects.

The second panel is an agency panel featuring three senior level agency execs: One who took the helm from his father and proceeded to grow the agency significantly through organic means and via acquisition; A second who started her own agency in the middle of the pandemic after spending 20 years in a leadership role at an independent mid-size agency; And a third who founded a digital shop and only recently sold it after a great track record of successful growth.

And our last panel is a new one…a combo panel of marketers AND agencies, talking about the future of the agency-client world from lots of levels (e.g., AI, in-house marketing, hiring, the economy).  Should be an exciting one! A full hour and a half of energetic and exciting dialogue!

And we’re excited to have two great speakers talking about building brands using two very different business models – both coming from two very different perspectives.  

Eric Anderson, CEO of AEG Vision will talk about how his career as a c-level leader in firms like Luxottica and LensCrafters helped shape his perspective in building the AEG Vision business.  Not the brand, but the business.  Eric uses what he calls “Upside Down Marketing” to manage hundreds of independent optometry offices, all with different brand names.

And Alyssa Lahham, the Global Marketing Officer at Slalom Consulting is doing it in a more traditional way, building the Slalom brand, one market at a time. While each market is tasked with staying within the brand guideline gates, each market is given free reign to hire who they please and market however they please. Quite the task for Alyssa to manage as she tries to maintain the consistency and equity of the Slalom brand!

And not to be outdone, on Thursday of the conference we will have a great panel of RSW New Business Directors (Natalia Formen, Chad Dils, and Dixie Bonenfant) discussing how they apply their creative talents to find new and interesting ways of breaking through to prospects.