Youth Meeting 2024
There are fixed dates in the life of agencies. For Próbakő, this is the organisation of the Youth Meeting, an international event of the Worldcom PR Group, with the following parameters: 3 days in May, about 30 PR professionals (typically under 30 years old and with less than 3 years of experience), 12 European PR agencies from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Portugal and Spain in 2024. Budapest, 15-17 May. But enough about the data, let us see how the 2024 meeting went.
Welcome to Budapest! We are getting to know each other.
Youth Meeting usually starts with a dinner in the heart of the city centre. This year’s meeting began at Kőleves Restaurant – with a welcome drink, a three-course menu and optional Hungarian delicacies (as most of the participants were visiting the country for the first time). After the welcome dinner, we showed the participants one of the iconic locations of the party district, Lámpás, the first and last stop of the evening, as the next day we young PR professionals were going to have a professional programme. I am telling you details.
PR 2024 – where is it and where is it going? Workshop and presentations.
The main attraction of the first professional day was the AI workshop by the Promptmaster team. The world is noisy about the impact that AI will have (or rather is having) on the environment and the way we work. There are a dozen of articles just explaining how it can be used in public relations. A fundamental part of our profession is the production of reports, and automating them (to a certain extent) is a great help for a (young) PR person who compiles them. The first part of the workshop covered the proper use of ChatGPT, i.e. how AI can be used more effectively in our work – for example in writing copy or summarising an article in a professional way. The second part of the workshop aimed to automate the process of compiling and reporting press release coverage, known as the ’clipping book’. It is all about the AI-provided assistance that allows for more creative and versatile work. The icing on the cake was that the workshop was an overwhelming success, based on feedback from participants.
We opened the professional day with a presentation about the Hungarian PR market by András Sztaniszláv, President of the Hungarian PR Association and ICCO,. We closed the day with a presentation by Tibor Farkas from the Digital Marketing Department of Corvinus University of Budapest.
What did the participants bring? Case studies and team competition.
We asked the young colleagues to present a project from their agency that a) has something to do with AI, b) is their love project. The end result was 12 international case studies, lots of creative ideas and, of course, a lot of clapping. My personal favourites were a French and Catalan campaign on pet identification and a feminist app.
What makes the Youth Meeting so special is the teamwork. Long before the Budapest meeting, we divided the participants into groups of 5-6 people, making sure that professionals from the same agencies are not in the same team, to allow more space for international networking. Teams could choose between two briefs: one on technology and one on sustainability. The campaign could be developed before or during the meeting, but the main goal was to present the finished plan on the final day, Friday morning. This was done. What has been particularly exciting for me is that the brief we sent to the participants has suddenly come to life. We received well-developed, creative and diverse campaigns, which were evaluated by a professional jury (András R. Nagy, CEO of Próbakő and Dr. György Szondi, professor at Károli Gáspár Reformed University) and awarded with a gift.
Beyond the agenda.
Youth Meeting is (also) about giving and receiving at the same time for us. We want young PR professionals from Europe to get to know the Hungarian PR market, the flavours, the atmosphere, the Hungarian creativity (we gave them a Rubik’s cube, for example). We create an opportunity to network, to share international knowledge – while we, as the host agency, get all this and the enthusiastic feedback that always sets us on the road to organise the meeting again next year.
