Well Met welcomes back the Visual Media Conference 2016

Well Met Conferencing, the conference office for Leeds Beckett University, hosted this year’s annual Visual Media Conference (VMC) on Tuesday 22 March 2016 at the Rose Bowl. The fascinating one day conference provided a vivid insight into the future landscape of marketing communications.

The conference returned to the Rose Bowl for a third year after its first event in 2014 and is organised by CDi Yorkshire (Creative and Digital Industries Yorkshire), a special interest group of the BPIF, whose main aim is to ensure that the creative and digital sector in the Yorkshire region maintains its position as a major national player.

Aimed at professionals in the creative, digital, print and packaging industries, VMC looks to address the effectiveness of communication channels and challenges the construct of an integrated marketing campaign. The event attracted nearly 200 delegates; an audience nearly triple the size of the first VMC, including brand owners and agency heads.

The Chair of Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership, Roger Marsh, opened the conference expressing the importance of the digital and creative sectors in the Leeds City Region. The Leeds City Region is the largest economy outside of London with 64,000 digital jobs and a creative sector worth £5bn per annum to the Leeds City economy.

The conference also welcomed a variety of prominent speakers including James Sommerville, VP of Global Design of The Coca-Cola Company; Oana Manolache, UK&I Marketing Manager of HP; Jon Bailey, Managing Director of print firm ProCo; Gavin Shore, Creative Director of Jaywing and Jamie Cregan, Research and Insight Director at MC&C.

The speaker programme saw industry experts debating and challenging pre-conceptions in their respective skill sets.

Robert McClements, CEO of CDi Yorkshire, said, “We wanted to focus on any channel that a marketing director would spend their budget on – that ranged from social, PR, print, augmented reality through to TV. The final session “The Reveal” presented a detailed analysis of the campaign used to promote the conference itself.”