The sun is shining over Leeds today, and the Leeds Dock free water taxi is as popular as ever, as thousands of visitors and exhibitors gather for two days of networking and top speakers at the North’s biggest B2B conference.

Buy Yorkshire 2016, organised by the Yorkshire Mafia, takes place today and tomorrow at the Royal Armouries, Leeds Dock. This year’s programme includes inspiring talks by founding director of M&C Saatchi, Jeremy Sinclair; Brett Gosper (Chief Executive of World Rugby and Managing Director of Rugby World Cup Limited); the Rt Hon Ann Widdecombe; and Terry Waite CBE.

Digital insights and updates will also be provided by the likes of Namara Murlidhar, Head of Marketing at LinkedIn Talent Solutions UK and Ireland; Adele Cooper, the UK & Ireland Country Manager for Pinterest; and Matt Woods , Senior Product Manager for the Internet of Things (IoT) at Vodaphone.

Jonny, Helen, Katy and Liam from the jrc.agency team are out and about today and tomorrow, following the action, catching up with clients and listening out for digital news, developments, stories and new perspectives from the Buy Yorkshire speakers.

Follow the #BuyYorkshire hashtag and our team on Twitter for live updates:

• Jonny @jrconsultancy
• Helen @_HelenRobinson
• Katy @_KatyStuart
• Liam @ThatLiamAnthony

And throughout today and tomorrow, we’ll be blogging here with updates and reviews of the seminars and conversations as they happen – so check back later tonight for a full roundup of the day’s events.

Adele Cooper, UK Country Manager at Pinterest ‘How to grow your business with Pinterest’ (Katy and Jonny)

The first seminar of the day was by Adele Cooper from Pinterest on how to use Pinterest to grow your business. The seminar was packed full of great, actionable tips for both B2B and B2C businesses, quashing the idea that Pinterest is only suitable for the ‘design or creative’ businesses.

First and foremost, Pinterest is all about driving people back to the source of the content and this means that pins should be helpful. It isn’t all about a pretty picture, in fact, almost far from it. These ‘pretty pictures’ are often better suited to Instagram and instead it is all about using a great picture with an even better description that makes the image useful to the audience and provides it with meaning.

Pinterest is one of the only social media platforms that is future orientated, it is for the forward planners out there. Facebook is in the past “Here are the photos from the holiday that I have just been on”, Twitter is in the present, “Here I am sitting on a beach making all of you back home very jealous”, Pinterest is in the future, “This is the type of beach I want to be sitting on in a few months time.”

Many people don’t realise but you can use video on Pinterest but you just need to make sure the video is hosted first on YouTube or Vine first.

Some great Pinterest statistics that were highlighted during the seminar:

• Pinterest has 80% mobile usage.
• 70% of users are female.
• 40% of UK audience that use Pinterest are millenials.
• 70% of content comes from the business, there is little user generated content on Pinterest.

We’ll be featuring a separate jrc.agency blog post on Pinterest for business very soon – so do keep checking back for updates (or sign up to receive the jrc.agency blog direct to your inbox here so you don’t miss it).

See how other organisations are using Pinterest here.

Jeremy Sinclair, Chairman and Founder of M&C Saatchi, ‘Brutal simplicity of thought’ (Helen)

Following on from The Billion Pound Panel in the ‘EEE Buy Yorkshire’ Theatre was Jeremy Sinclair, chairman and founder of M&C Saatchi, speaking on ‘Brutal Simplicity Of Thought’.

Described in The Drum as the “shadowy partner” of M&C Saatchi, and the “quiet man of advertising”, Jeremy humbly explained he was taking opportunities to practice his speaking with different audiences – joking that he was keen for some of that famous brutal Yorkshire honesty on his performance afterwards:

He began with this quote from Bertrand Russell:

“Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world and the chief glory of man.”

But he also said that most people would rather die than think. Why? Because it’s hard. Jeremy spoke about the painful necessity of thought. That in advertising, all elements of slowness, limitation and dullness needs to be cut away to allow for that one simple message to emerge.

‘Brutal simplicity of thought’ is the mantra that M&C Saatchi lives by.

“Be brutal on yourself and your thought processes,” Jeremy advises. “Delete embellishments, cut waffle and irrelevancies. Be simple, because simple messages enter brain quicker and stay longer.” It’s good manners, he said, as people have less time.

So the message should be simple, but to achieve this in advertising, the process behind the work has to be brutal. Keep distilling, and distilling – it can be a long and painful process.

Jeremy shared some of his and his agency’s work, and spoke about the impact they had on political campaigns.

To achieve the desired simplicity, he explained, also requires some bravery on the part of the client. To distill numerous selling messages into one single message, or even one word, requires a lot of trust between client and creative – it’s brave to cut everything else out, but necessary in order to have impact.

For example, when he presented the famous 1974 Conservative poster “Labour isn’t working” design to Margaret Thatcher, she is alleged to have asked why the word “Labour” was bigger than the word “Conservatives.” A reasonable question, says Jeremy, but she trusted us on the design, and the resulting impact of the campaign was huge.

“How do you market to millennials?” was one of the questions from the floor (millennials having been a common theme for discussion throughout this year’s conference).

Jeremy replied that nothing really changes except time. Millenials may “do” things differently, but their core emotions, fears, humour, human drivers are all the same. The key difference nowadays is the ability to respond or do something quickly – instantly – because of digital technology. Time has been compressed, and so the process has changed – but the end result should be the same.

The seminar was a real insight into the company philosophy that M&C Saatchi is built upon and how businesses of all shapes, sizes and industries can use this ethos. The brutal simplicity of thought is a painstaking process of distillation and elimination, through which that single brilliant idea (hopefully!) emerges.

Reflecting on Jeremy Sinclair’s talk, I was reminded of Susan Cain’s famous TED talk “The power of introverts”. The “quiet man” of advertising, so clearly a deep thinker, has been behind some of the most powerful adverts (particularly in politics) over the last few decades. In a busy world where “time is money” and those who speak the loudest are heard most often, it often pays to take a step back, think, and distill your ideas. The work you achieve by doing so can be much better quality and have much bigger impact as a result.

Luke Lang – Co-founder & CMO, Crowdcube (Jonny)

Crowdcube is the world’s first, largest and most active investment crowdfunding platform. Some key facts about Crowdcube:

• £160 mil raised (£85 mil in 2015; £35m so far in 2016 in UK)
• Registered investors: 280,000
• Over 400 successful raises

Four types of private investor:

• Everyday (ordinary folk)
• Advised investors
• High net worth individuals
• Sophisticated investors

90% of people who invest are ordinary, everyday people. 60% of the monetary value of investments comes from high net worth individuals and sophisticated investors.

Where are Crowdcube investors based?:

• 50% live in London
• 65% are in the South West and London

Businesses from Yorkshire that have been funded through Crowdcube:

What does the future hold?

Statistics from the Crowdcube website show:

• Strong trend to mobile
• 65% of investment comes from desktop
• Mobile is strong in the morning, desktop during day and then mobile big in evening (as would be expected with people checkign their phones on the commute to work and while sitting at home in the evenings)

I asked Luke a question about what else should businesses be using crowds for?

His reply: “Getting expertise”

I totally agree with this. There is lots of power with the crowd, for example through market research for campaigns and website testing for websites (eg usertesting.com etc). It’s an interesting topic and one that we’ll be exploring in more detail for jrc.agency clients – how to harness collective knowledge to understand and target new markets including how individuals prefer to engage with brands online.

 

The Rt Hon Ann Widdecombe, Former MP and best-selling novellist (Jonny)

Ann Widdecombe’s seminar sparked plenty of discussion (mainly about Brexit!). The former MP, star of Strictly Come Dancing and novelist, shared her experiences and insights on about changing direction – in life and business.

When I asked Ann, “You wrote about patients being denied fresh flowers recently, how do we overturn such a daft rule and bring some hope, joy and cheer back into hospital wards?” she went on to speak about the compensation culture that we are currently living in and how we should instead be moving towards the concept of the acceptable hazard. In her typically refreshing upfront and honest style, Ann said she thought the regulation was stupid and cruel.

Whatever you think of Ann’s political views, she certainly got delegates talking! And I couldn’t resist asking her for a selfie….

Dan Walker, Concept Artist for Warner Bros, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Universal, Dreamworks (Liam)

Concept artist Dan Walker has worked for the likes of Marvel, DC, Fox and the BBC, for both the big and small screen.

Dan spoke about how he moved from an engineering job to follow his passion of concept design. Moving straight into the film industry, his first concept design job was to design the interior of the Bat-mobile for Batman Begins. From there, he went on to work on over 40 different productions, including returning for The Dark Knight Rises (he designed the new Bat-mobile interior), as well as designing the Sonic Screwdriver and parts of the T.A.R.D.I.S. interior for Doctor Who.

My background (and BA) is in television production, so I was interested to hear Dan talk about his experiences in conceptual design for film and television, summarising some of his best work and explaining how he came up with several of his designs and ideas. He also spoke about his move back from London to Yorkshire, delivering a brilliant presentation with a side serving of Yorkshire flavour.

 

What have been your higlights from Buy Yorkshire 2016 so far?

Do share them in the comments box below!

We’ll be back tomorrow for more live tweeting and blogging – see you then!

#BuyYorkshire