On stage with Generation G

Once upon a time, you knew where you were, with The Marketing Society. You went along for quality, and quality was what you got. The Annual Conference would be at an establishment venue – somewhere with “Royal” or “British” in the name – and you’d hear object lessons in marketing success from the great and the good: CEOs and CMOs to a man. (Or sometimes a woman, though less often).
 
Of course, it wasn’t all suits: we had celebrity chefs, polar explorers, Olympic athletes and other successful public figures. But even then, it all seemed a bit powerpoint.
 
Please don’t misunderstand. We all enjoyed this. We learned a lot and we liked our annual chat with old friends.

And don’t get me wrong, this author for one has a huge respect for the former management team who transformed the Society from an insolvent not-for-profit, into a network of global leaders.
 
But all good things come to a new beginning. And the Marketing Society most certainly has.

As Bob Dylan put it, ‘But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”
 
The Society has a new CEO and a new Board of Management. The conference was designed by a team, rather than a conference chair with famous friends.
 
We had a new venue, too: the Science Museum, which is neither “British” nor “Royal”.
 
Instead of coffee in the foyer, we had ice lollies among spacecraft and jet engines.

Some of the audience looked suspiciously young. Had some of the Corporate Members started to bring their STAFF??
 
And the speakers! The program was incredible. We had a Syrian refugee turned film-maker, an academic who researched bravery rather than strategy, a violinist who lost her Stradivarius on Euston station, a surfer who broke more bones than he could name and still went back for more, and a Saudi woman who still can’t legally drive a car at home but has climbed the highest mountain on every continent of the world.
 
And when we did hear from the suits, we had the founder of a tech startup. We had a man from Mars hinting at paraplegic sex and Mark Thompson of The New York Times, who has ridden the wave of Trump’s disapproval to create the fastest growing and most profitable newspaper in the world’s biggest economy. His thesis? Only publish content that is worth paying for.
 
Brave indeed.

If we learned a little less intellectually, we sure as hell learned a lot more, emotionally.
 
Then on to the dinner. Out went the Marketer of the Year Award for Past Glories. In came a bunch of people we’d never heard of, but who turned out to be brilliant. Improvising pianists, rap poets, a comedian you could actually like. OK, it was still a dressy gala dinner. And OK, we were all starving by the time the food arrived. But it was FUN. It was ENTERTAINMENT. It was BRAVE.

Gen G has arrived.

As Syl Saller put it, quoting Hunter S. Thompson (and who would have thought THAT): “Buy a ticket. Take the Ride.”

Julian Boulding is founder of thenetwork one, follow him @thenetworkone