A three-day web conference for smart web marketers

Last summer, we started talking to colleagues about creating a web conference in Vancouver. I think there have been several good marketing events in Vancouver, but no great ones. We connected with about 30 of our friends and colleagues to pick their brains. We ended up with these criteria for a conference:

• The smartest marketers would be there
• The conversations would be about web strategy, not WordPress plug-ins
• It would be an emerging trust network, where we could talk about failures as well as successes
• It wouldn’t have any sponsors
• The speakers would have insights to share, not products to sell
• It would take place in a natural setting near, but not in, Vancouver

A few months later, Fireworks Factory was born. We’re betting our time and money on the belief that there’s an appetite for this kind of conference in Vancouver.

For who’s coming, who’s speaking and other details, visit the Fireworks Factory website.

Why is it called Fireworks Factory?

We lived in Malta for a year in 2007, on the small island of Gozo. Each town on Gozo has a week-long religious festival–Malta is the most Catholic nation outside of the Vatican–punctuated by fireworks and pyrotechnics. These explosives were all homegrown, crafted in a community-owned fireworks factory on the edge of town. Men from the village would spend time there building and testing fireworks, in the hopes of outdoing their rival towns. Occasionally, something horrible would happen.

Still, they were communal spaces where something risky and breathtaking gets imagined and created. That seemed like a good metaphor for the kind of conference we want to run.