14 May 2010. I am getting ready to go to a Coventry Conversation hosted this time by one of the most important advertising guru. When you hear that a man was declared the 9^th Most Influential Person in Media, partner of Beattie McGuinness Bungay, formerly chairman of TBWA London comes to talk to you about his career you don’t know what to expect. Perhaps his already old and boring, or he’ll chatter about God knows what for an hour. A man that important surely is too clever for me to understand. But I’m glad to tell that Trevor Beattie rose up beyond my expectations.

From the moment you see him you realize that he’s not like all the others. A simple man, wearing jeans and a jacket, with curly, raffled black hair. He immediately caught the audience’s attention with his humor despite his cold. He began his speech with a question: What is the big idea? He then again argued the concept of “big idea” and came to the conclusion that you don’t have to have a big idea, instead you need a thousand of little ideas. It’s unlikely that you will impress someone with one big idea, they may not like it or they may not be on the same page that you are, but if you shoot a thousand of little ideas at him, chances are that he’ll like at least one of them.

In his opinion, there are only three big ideas. The first one is the invention of the wheel. Of course from this big idea, many other little ideas came to life, like the troller or the bags with wheels which are essential today. The other big idea he argued is the Internet which may be seen as a sum of small ideas. The last of what he considered the big ideas was commercial space travel for which he created the PR and marketing campaign.

The whole Conversation was entertaining and inspiring, but in the end it focused more on politics rather than advertising.

Tuesday, 18^th March, Dave Pegg appeared in front of us to speak about Design, Marketing and Advertising at Cadbury. For those who don’t know who Dave Pegg is, he is team manager for Cadbury’s in-house design studio. He is one of my favourites since he gave to those present food for the mind and the body. In front each seat there was a chocolate bar waiting for us. Even better than the chocolate bar was the story the man in front of us was about to unravel.

I found out that Cadbury has an in-house design studio. The first question that crossed my mind was why a chocolate confectioner has its own design studio. It immediately made sense when Dave said that they are producing 4,500 design pieces a year and it seems that everything produced for Cadbury is overseen by Dave. I found out that Cadburys is also, doing commissioned work for outside brands, worth 9 million pounds a year; this is quite good for a chocolate confectioner.

Mr. Pegg gave us a short history on Cadbury’s brand and showed us some older packaging and advertisements. It seems that John Cadbury created the first advertisement in 1824, being the first in-house designer for the company. The evolution of advertising is pretty interesting. It started with the advertisement of products and gradually evolved to a brand advertisement. This idea of advertisement is very useful from my point of view. Making the public aware of the fact that the brand itself is the best will ease the release of new products but will also improve the selling of older products.

Returning to my old passion, Google, on 5^th of March 2010, Peter Barron made his entry at Coventry Conversations. He is Google’s head of communications and public affairs and he could almost pass for a YouTube sensation. As ‘spizz13’, he is featured in a series of videos, blasting out rock numbers from his Fen der Telecaster. One film has attracted more than 50,000 views alongside 84 largely complimentary comments. Google’s head of communications and public affairs, it is safe to say, he truly understands the power of online media.

His speech approached different subjects revolving around the complex concept of Google. He entertained the audience with numerous clever facts regarding Google’s daily searches as well as Youtube and social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or Myspace. He then switched to Google Street View which is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world. On 18^th March 2008, the Street View application was available in the United Kingdom and Netherlands.

Another innovation from Google that Peter Barron explained was Google Goggles. It is a visual application; instead of words you take a picture with your phone camera and Google will attempt to recognize the object and return relevant search results. Visual search it is still in its infancy but in the future it will help do more cool things like suggesting a move in a chess game or taking a picture of a leaf to identify the plant.

At the end of his speech he answered to questions regarding Google’s privacy controversy and not only. He commented that it’s all about trust; people search on Google because they know that they will be provided with the best answers and Google tries to improve itself in order to maintain people’s loyalty.