Music innovators Don Van Cleave (left) and Kevin Grosch delivered an opening session exploring the parallels between the music and promotional products industries. Music innovators Don Van Cleave (left) and Kevin Grosch delivered an opening session exploring the parallels between the music and promotional products industries.

Innovation and change are the key educational themes at this week’s PPAI North American Leadership Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The annual event opened Sunday evening with the presentation of the PPB Rising Stars, and wraps up tonight with a closing networking dinner featuring live country music. More than 120 industry leaders from companies in the U.S., Mexico and Canada are attending, including 35 first-time attendees.

“The goal for this year's conference is to provide participants with ideas and mechanisms for dealing with the fast pace of change,” says Catherine Graham, president of commonsku and co-leader of the NALC Work Group,  a team of volunteers who planned the conference along with PPAI staff. “This ranges from hearing how the music industry survived massive disruption by technology to techniques such as mindfulness that Silicon Valley leaders have used to successfully cope with change.”

NALC-Speakers NALC's speaker line-up included (clockwise from top left) marketing technologist Travis Wright, futurist Daniel Burrus, Sideqik CEO Kurt Uhlir and CEO coach Michael Burcham, among many others.

Playing off the conference’s setting in Music City, Monday’s opening session featured a co-presentation by veteran music producer and Baby Boomer Don Van Cleave, and music innovator and Millennial Kevin Grosch, who drew a number of parallels between the music business and the promotional products industry by discussing some of the economic challenges, disrupters and opportunities the business faces. Not unlike what the promotional products industry has experienced, the evolution of technology has threatened the way music is delivered and consumed. It has meant the collapse of traditional record stores and spawned iTunes, Pandora, Spotify and other streaming music platforms. “As a result, there’s more consumption of music now than ever before,” says Grosch. Technology has also changed how artists are interacting with customers through the use of social media to create communal conversations about music, and how social media is being used to build an artist’s brand and create experiences.

NALC attendee Sharon Willochell, president of Leed’s, says, “I loved the opening speakers because I thought they really set the tone well for expanding our thinking, looking at our whole industry and dealing with outside forces. [The speakers] could have looked at digital music and the drop in revenue from $15 billion to $6 billion in 10 years and said, ‘this is a disaster’ but instead they asked, ‘What opportunities could this mean for us? Now we’re going to build our whole company around digital assets.’ It was fascinating.”

Dave Regan, MAS, vice president of sales, Vernon Company, took away another idea. “The first session showed a 50-something guy working with a 25-year-old, and how they negotiated and respected each other and made room for each other’s opinions. It says a lot for how our industry can embrace the different generations,” Regan says.

Education sessions continued throughout Monday afternoon on topics including digital marketing, emotional intelligence, community volunteerism, innovation and technology, and a strategic foresight session led by Daniel Burrus, one of the world’s leading futurists on global trends and innovation. Burrus taught listeners how to distinguish between hard trends and soft trends, and he challenged them to commit an hour a week to unplug from the present and plug into the future by thinking about the hard trends and what opportunities they offer.

NALC 2015 drew More than 120 industry leaders from companies in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. NALC 2015 drew More than 120 industry leaders from companies in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

Mitch Mounger, president of Sunrise Identity and co-leader of the NALC Work Group, was excited to see the group’s many planning conversations come to fruition. “Catherine and I wanted to make sure we connected the theme of this year’s event to the roots of our host city, Nashville,” he says. “In business today, we are all feeling the impact of technology and how fast it is moving.  Nashville is a perfect backdrop to this topic as no other industry has felt the impact of technology more than the music industry.  Our goal is to hit a number of relevant leadership topics and foster the incredible community and networking events that the NALC is known for.”

The conference continues today with sessions on disruptive innovation, a market outlook, business challenges roundtable discussions and breakout sessions, and the closing session on employee engagement. NALC will intersect with the start of the second annual PPAI Technology Summit opening this afternoon and continuing through Wednesday. Read more about it in Thursday’s PPB Newslink.