As the President of the AMIN Worldwide Global Board, it was a proud moment to see one of the most valuable conferences I’ve ever witnessed unfolding over the past week in California.
Hosted by San Francisco-based host agency, H/L, the 2024 AMIN conference's themes centred on leadership and the implications of the continuing explosion of AI. For me, the top 5 highlights of the conference included:
1. The personification of a great leader
Al Guido, President of the San Francisco 49ers NFL and Chairman and CEO of Elevate, a sport-focused brand consulting, sales, strategy, and talent optimisation consultancy was simply inspiring as he shared his leadership philosophies and some stunning insights into the business of elite sport. Al subscribes to the John Wooden school of team leadership (‘be the best prepared to win and the results will follow’) in his team’s work within F1, Indycar, Nascar, NBA, NFL, EPL and other global sporting codes. A quiet, carefully spoken giant of his industry, Al’s insights on how AI is helping sports to better engage their fan bases, delivering more intuitive and personalised experiences was nothing less than astonishing.
2. The almost limitless opportunities predicted for AI
The aptly-named Nik Kleverov of Native Foreign shared his cutting edge experience as a beta tester of the Sora AI platform, which enables full-resolution moving images to be created with no visual source material. This included a behind the scenes look at his globally famous Toys R Us Origin Story campaign which demonstrated the immense emerging capability of AI in the creative realm. His advice was simple. The genie is out of the bottle, so lean in and enjoy the ride.
3. Chaos is good
A constant theme of this AI-focused conference was that the rapidity of change was creating waves of opportunity, uncertainly, change and disruption, the consequences of which not even the leading exponents of the technology can predict with any certainty. James Bavington of UK member agency, StrategiQ, provided behind-the-scenes insights into the troubled launch of Google’s AI Overviews, which not only yielded some very strange search outcomes but led to a 17% dip in paid search performance (which will no doubt be temporary but that serves to highlight the swirl of uncertainty around the technology).
4. AI as a master of data
H/L’s Tim Schatz, Director of Analytics and John Jamison, Director of Engineering, discussed AI as a means of simplifying data, including the ability to employ AI to filter and make sense of vast amounts of data to enhance the planning, targeting, testing and measurement of communications campaigns. According to Tim and John, big data is no longer a focal point of high-level consumer insights.
5. The value of allyship
In many ways, the value of meeting and collaborating in person seems old fashioned. But genuine allyship and the physical sharing of experiences and insights will survive any and every new technology as long as the human spirit exists. There is no substitute for the exchange of ideas and insights that a conference like AMIN Worldwide CEO conference 2024 delivers.
Thanks to Trey Curtola, CEO of H/L, his team and that of the AMIN Worldwide executive team for another amazing event.