Over the past two days I’ve attended the 3rd Annual Advertising and Marketing Communication Conference “Box Basics” which was organized by IAA Jordan. Overall the event was better than last year, even that there were no topics about online media like the previous one but it was interesting.

To start with, the name “Box Basics” is better than the cliché phrase “Outside The Box”, and most importantly the conference covered basics of the industry, well not all the time, but many presentations were really good.

The one I liked the most was about copywriting, by Andy Owen, he is really amazing and I guess he is the best in this field. I liked the one by Ed Jones the Regional Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi in the Middle East; he is a mastermind. The impressive one was Chris Staples of Rethink in Canada, who presented a lot of amazing ideas on how to create impressive work with very little budgets.

Elliot Polak from Text Appeal gave some interesting insights about culture differences and how to deal with it, while Chris Savage from Oglivy PR in Australia showed a group of devastating examples of PR crisis and couple of effective ways to handle it.

And of course it won’t be complete without Zain and Orange, both kept debating who is the largest, who is better, who wants to give bags and giveaways, both speakers “Philippes” were really entertaining and funny. I liked when the guy from Zain started his presentation using the same theme of Zain’s campaign; this is my presentation, those are my friends…

At the end, Herve de Clerck from adforum.com ran a group of winning ads and TVCs from all over the world, and a collection of ads that used duplicated ideas; it was a really interesting presentation.