Brian Wetjen of Bozell takes the floor at Stack Unconference on Tuesday, September 6. Photo from Phenomblue on Facebook.
Last week, two unconferences took place in Omaha amidst Omaha Creative Week.
On Tuesday, Stack, an event geared towards advertising and design professionals, attracted nearly 100 attendees. On Saturday, BarCamp Omaha, an event with three tracks – entrepreneurship, creative and technology – bought together more than 200.
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Together, that’s more than 300 individuals (with some crossover) participating in conversations, critique, collaboration, idea generation and just all-around fun. And you can count several hundred more individuals in the total when you look at the 35 events of Omaha Creative Week.
“There is a ton of demand for knowledge growth and community building in the Midwest and Omaha is a great environment for bringing people together,” Joe Olsen (left, photo courtesy of Olsen), co-organizer of Omaha Creative Week and CEO of Phenomblue, said in an email interview earlier this week.
“The great attendance at all the events this week is a great indication as well that the economy here is strong,” said Olsen, who’s currently splitting his time between Omaha and Los Angeles as Phenomblue opens shop on the West Coast. “That’s something you have to be excited about with all the negative news in the marketplace right now.”
While we’ve shed some light on the BarCamp schedule and photobooth, we wanted to look back farther and give some attention to Stack. Unfortuntaely, we didn’t make it to the event so we reached out to Kate Richling, Phenomblue’s marketing director, for a brief recap.
“This year, Stack continued to bring together creative professionals that typically work on their own or within their agencies,” Richling (left, photo from twitter.com) said. “We shared industry insights and trends, including how to sell creative to clients, social media best practices, the future of experience and supporting the local design indie community.
“Not only was it exciting to see what others are working on, but also hearing others’ insights was inspiring for our own work,” Richling said. “Next year, we’re excited to watch Stack continue to grow and keep having these types of conversations that are collaborative and constructive for those in creative advertising.”
Here are more photos from the event (from Phenomblue on Facebook):
