Celebrating 30 years, BBN’s Academy this year took place just outside Paris, France, where 50 participants from our international partners took part in a week of workshops and masterclasses to learn more about some of BBN’s Navigator tools from our integrated B2B marketing toolkit. Navigator defines best practice B2B marketing methodologies, processes and tools and has been adopted by all our BBN partners.
The Academy program delivered a mix of teaching, in order to explain and provide a common strategic foundation along with group exercises that helped embed the knowledge. Working in teams, our participants applied the Navigator tools and their own ideas to arrive at a final ‘Pitch’ presentation for a real client project.
This year we selected HITS as our Academy client, an American, non-profit youth theatre where children aged 6-18 are welcomed to express themselves and explore their creativity through theatre.
HITS provides a safe place for students to learn and parents feel at ease knowing their kids are in good hands. HITS are in the business of creating ‘excellent humans’, not superstars and they believe in kids learning something really valuable, not just having fun and being part of a performance.
Participants were divided into three different teams and were provided with a client brief containing the same strategic input as a baseline. Each team was then asked to develop a creative Big Long Idea with content & channel strategies along with suggestions of how their campaign might be measured. The outputs on the final day were simply outstanding and the judging panel deliberated at length to choose an Academy winner. Ideas from each of the three teams were presented to the client a week after the Academy.
We also delivered a 2-hour BBN induction session and an interactive session where partners shared their BBN success stories with colleagues.
You can view the complete BBN Academy gallery here on Flickr and on Facebook
The week culminated with two intense days of C-Map training delivered by expert practitioners and creators of C-Map, Patrick Smith (Bader Rutter) and Anol Bhattacharya (GetIT Comms). C-Map is BBN’s proprietary process for multi-channel connection. It gives B2B brands a framework and strategy to maximise the effectiveness and profitability of campaigns. The content and format was superb and seamlessly delivered. Not only did participants learn about the C-Map tools, best practice and processes, teams created some excellent outputs presented at the end of day two, that would be later shared with the workshop client Lenovo.
…until next year!