Leading Marketers at Spotlight 2015
Imagine you have only 13 minutes to talk about the most important things. Are you going to talk about the success of your company, or your own great achievements or biggest failures? Fourteen Georgia marketers will take this difficult challenge for the third time. On the eve of the main marketing event Spotlight 2015, which will take place in Tbilisi on May 24, Georgia Today tried to find out who those people will be and why the interest in marketing has grown over the past few years.
“Our main goal is to develop Georgian marketing. We set this mission when creating the Marketer online magazine and Spotlight is one of the tools to achieve this goal. As it turned out, it became a wildly popular event,” said Nino Akhalaia, Manager of Spotlight.
The first Spotlight was held in 2013 based on the well-known TED (Technology Entertainment Design) example. The main idea is to allow marketing representatives to speak about their achievement for just 13 minutes. Not much time, but enough to focus only on the most important details.
Moreover, Spotlight is the only place in Georgia where people from the marketing environment can meet, exchange experiences, assess each other’s work, establish communication and create joint projects that helps to develop marketing throughout the country.
Nino Akhalaia says that when the project was launched, people were quite skeptical. “We have a stereotype that Georgians can’t make high quality products. But all our speakers are great experts in their field. Most of them graduated universities abroad then were able to return, apply their knowledge in the Georgian reality and bring their companies to a leading position,” she explained.
Wendy’s & Dunkin’ Donuts, Silknet, Radisson Blu, Geocell, Adjara Group, Caucasus Online, Myvideo.ge, Tbilisi Zoo and others will be presented at Spotlight 2015. Every year speakers were selected in cooperation with the Marketer’s readers, which means that Spotlight is not only a purely professional event, but is also interesting for people who are not involved in marketing.
Spotlight focuses only on marketing managers; their companies are just a platform from which the professionals realize their ideas.
“We never make a choice in favour of large companies. You can work in a low-budget enterprise, but achieve more in this area than a representative of a multi-million dollar corporation. We are interested in the person and his/her unique professional and life experience, so I think that why Spotlight is also interesting for people who are far from the profession,” said Akhalaia.
Experience shows that people who are interested in the event are, in 99% of cases, from the marketing field. In addition to the invited former speakers and partner organizations, Spotlight is for the second time selling tickets to the public. These are in limited supply- just 150 and yet they steadily sold out less than a day.
The organizers do not think about expansion; seeing as Spotlight’s format implies chamber performances (300-400 people maximum), it is better to maintain contact and interaction between the speaker and the audience. But for those unable to attend, all the speeches will be recorded and later available on Spotlight’s official website (www.spotlight.ge)
Spotlight itself does not concede from the participants in terms of implementation of marketing ideas and surprises. Georgia Today even managed to find out some of the participants. For example, Zackharia Metreveli and Dimitri Vachnadze, winners of Young Cannes Lions in Georgia, will be awarded with a special prize. Moreover, Pasha Bank, Spotlight’s official partner, will announce a new program that has already started on Facebook.
“MyBookChallenge, from Pasha Bank is a very important project for all people who involved in marketing and, thanks to this project, they will have new opportunities for development. That’s all I can say as the full announcement will be this Sunday at the Spotlight 2015,”Akhalaia concluded.
Eka Karsaulidze