Meta “Conversations” Conference

Conversations is Meta's inaugural conference dedicated to businesses, developers, and partners interested in building better and faster experiences on the most popular messaging platforms – all with the goal of meeting people where they want to be met. Meta shared new product updates and insights as well as feature technical deep-dives, demos and panels. Attendees heard directly from Meta's executives such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, product leads, partners, and leading global brands. There were three tracks: enterprise, small business, and developer.

I co-managed the Small Business track with one other lead. My role consisted of brainstorming the purpose/north star of what small businesses would care about regarding messaging, identifying and prepping speakers for each session, scripting each of the nine sessions, project managing timelines and organizing rehearsal sessions. I was the POC for all communications about the track, as well as shareouts around results. 

“Art of Conversation” Speaker series and toolkit

Art of Conversation is an A-list speaker series highlighting the power of conversation through messaging, and its ability to build relationships between people and brands. 

Celebrities, entertainers, creatives, brands, and other talent who are masters of conversation are invited to speak about how they use conversation to build empathy, drive connection, and the art of dialogue with Meta's executive leaders. It was crucial that the voices we chose had global appeal, and came from underrepresented backgrounds, as WhatsApp is the app of diaspora and I wanted to champion that in this series. 

Toolkit

As a spin-off from Whatsapp's Cannes-Lions multi-prong beach activation, I wanted to help other teams recreate "The Art of Conversation" speaker series at their regional and global events.

This Art of Conversation toolkit provided strategic direction, messaging, creative direction and asset examples to guide internal teams and agencies to execute Business Messaging’s global thought leadership speaker series “Art of Conversation” 

WhatsApp @ Cannes-Lions

WhatsApp had a $1 million budget to activate at Cannes-Lions for the first time ever. Facebook as a company had just transitioned to become Meta and the core apps were trying to find ways to fit into Meta's new brand story and metaverse future. The task was complex; how can we marry WhatsApp's bustling, global consumer audience while showcasing its innovative use cases for businesses, all while dazzling the creative, progressive Cannes-Lions community? After writing a thorough creative brief and strategy outlining our vision and how I'd execute, we landed on our north star SMIT: Conversation creates opportunities that unlocks creativity, connection and economic value between brands and their audiences.

Goal: Get Cannes Lions attendees to understand how conversation creates opportunity by demonstrating real use cases of business messaging and proving the increasing importance of messaging to customers.

I've attached a link to a presentation showcasing the full breadth of how I, and the many teams I collaborated with, executed this ask.

The Strategy:

The Power of the Global Diaspora

WhatsApp is the app of choice for the global diaspora and first-gen immigrants to communicate with one another, and diversity is in its DNA. I made sure that the speakers we brought to act as brand ambassadors represented those communities. Hasan Minhaj speaks about WhatsApp in his stand-up and how it has helped connect him to his Indian family and friends. Yvonne Orji is Nigerian a country with 36.35MAP on the platform. I intentionally made sure to feature conversationalists who come from underrepresented communities to not only amplify those voices and the communities they represent, but to push Meta’s commitment to diversity.

The intersection of art, design, and tech

Conversational AI has been a hot topic over the past years, particularly in the past few months. I tapped into this aspect of culture through pitching and working with our agency to build a conversational AI workshop to show brands how this technology can help build relationships. We also build AI mural art bringing the art aspect to AI, highlighting how something technical can feel personal. Users could send a message to our WhatsApp Concierge bot and create a unique DALL-E-generated image that would display in the Beach space as art.

Communicating in the way people prefer

As soon as attendees from around the globe touch down in Cannes, WhatsApp will become the preferred messaging app everyone uses to communicate with friends, family, and other attendees. To form personal connections at the event, people would ask “are you on WhatsApp?” or say “Let’s WhatsApp” to connect. We leveraged this to put our stake in the ground and why we chose to lead with WhatsApp.