Atlanta is home to some of the world’s most recognizable consumer brands, most independent and innovative agencies, and hottest brands of tomorrow. What makes this marketing world tick? We ask our panel of local brands, agencies and media companies to share their best practices, how they are leveraging local resources and insights to build a robust Atlanta marketing economy. Which hometown agencies and emerging brands are following a new marketing vision while bringing unique Atlanta flavor to everything they do?

More than just a keynote, this OMMA Atlanta presentation delves into the world of Connected Coca-Cola, the digital-first internal communications system from one of the world’s largest brands. Both an internal strategy and digital ecosystem, Connected Coca-Cola elevates the Atlanta native’s digital IQ across the entire organization, informing how the company thinks about consumer connected experiences across today’s many endpoints. Four members of Coca-Cola’s marketing team will walk us through this massive initiative that drives deep engagement with Coke’s worldwide user base, as well as revenue growth.

Atlanta is a progressive, creative, innovative city, rich in cultural diversity, a leader in civil rights, and the home to many global organizations, yet too few people outside the city recognize it as such. This session reviews the “I Am ATL” campaign by the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau that sets out to change people’s perceptions about Atlanta through promoting videos of local characters across multiple digital and social platforms. The presentation will review the success of the campaign, the efficacy of each tactic and channel, and discuss the challenges of executing a multi-agency campaign across multiple platforms.

Cross-channel marketing in theory is easy, but putting it in practice is a daunting task. How do you structure your internal team? How do you manage communication with multiple vendors? And how exactly do you make sure each channel is doing its part (and launching on time). This session will dive into specifics on how to execute cross-channel marketing without losing your mind, complete with campaign planning, examples, challenges, wins and lessons learned (and still learning) along the way.

“Transparency” took a hit in 2016. The ANA and 4As openly bickering over its basic meaning. Fraud and accountability woes undermined trust even in the giants of the digital ad economy. And marketers put their ad business up for review in record numbers. But how are these national issues of client/agency trust playing out for independent agencies, local ad economies, and the Atlanta market in particular?