Trend Reporting
Trend reporting has been a great platform for speaking and thought leadership.
In the fall of 2017 Jennifer Passas launched Carbone Smolan Agency’s trend reporting practice. The goals of this practice were to develop our strategy team through immersion and exploration of the innovations happening across the industries we serve, while creating valuable content for new business and marketing at the agency. Since it’s inception the practice became a value part of the success of our team and presentations of each report have become mainstay at all-staff meetings. When Jennifer left CSA for Gensler’s brand group in 2018, I took over leadership of the practice.
South by Southwest
Building on this practice, Jennifer and I pitched a new idea to leadership. We saw an opportunity to better understand the trends of the market and the landscape where our clients operate, by attending one of the largest commercial conferences in the world. In 2017 we lobbied for and won funding from CSA to attend South by Southwest 2018. This was the first time CSA had sent strategists to a conference. It was a great experience. We learned a lot, brought back the knowledge to our colleagues in the office and created content to share with our clients.
The next logical step was to participate. In 2018 we were accepted to present a workshop on the practice that brought us there in the first place.
We got some great feed back:
Radical Research Summit
This past September I has the opportunity to present this work again, with a twist. The Radical Research Summit is an annual conference in Vancouver for UX researchers. Together with experience strategist Kate Watson, this talk transformed to address the needs of UX designers and researchers for finding new methodologies to understand and respond to their users and make their products great.
You can see a full video of the talk below: