• This space for presentations and networking featured Isabel Martínez, Lorena Macías and Ignacio Bordes.
• Resorting to memes, acid language and Artificial Intelligence are new tools at the service of professionals.

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 4 May 2023 – Reaching the audience through new forms of communication, in which immediacy, creativity and ingenuity take precedence, is the great challenge facing marketing, communication and advertising professionals. This was made clear at the eleventh edition of Canarias Comunica, which was held on the afternoon of Thursday 4 May at Infecar.

The Canary Islands Communication Forum, Canarias Comunica 2023, opened its doors to bring together “lovers of marketing, advertising and communication and put creativity at the centre of the debate”, as Infecar’s director, Nata-lia Santana, explained. This edition “has sought to give the relevance it deserves to creativity in today’s formats and languages, with marketing strategies that are developed in a market that has mobile phones as its main allies and immediacy as its travelling companion”.
This forum has given a voice to two “creative experts who take social networks by storm” such as @IsabelitaVirtual, Isabel Martínez, or @hazmeunafotoasi, Lorena Macías, together with the experiential workshop by Ignacio Bordes to bring participants closer to creative thinking or creativity in the 5.0 era.

The first to take the stage was Isabel Martínez, known around the world as Isabelita Virtual, a profile born of fear that opened the doors to her professional success. Her talk, ‘Thanks fear: creativity in times of uncertainty’, reviewed the path to a profile that already has 616,000 followers on Instagram.

“Fear has always helped me to move forward, and in a context that did not change, I decided to take the plunge and move forward. As she explained in front of a hundred participants, she had to decide whether to “continue until eternity or be the engine of change”. Isa-bel Martínez, as well as tackling the world of social networks and relationships with them, delved into “the contexts of uncertainty, because the newer something is, the less secure you are”, as is the case with technology, artificial intelligence, social networks, blockchain and the metaverse.
To those who filled the Sala Canarias to listen to her, she advised them “to do, not to be afraid of imperfection because what is done is better than what is per-fect”. In this process, as she confessed, “don’t wait for applause and don’t do something because others don’t like it, persevere”, because opportunities “are created by each person” and sooner or later “you will be seen” because “you don’t need to be seen by many, but by those you want to be seen”.

For her part, the advertising creative, consultant and creator of content in her personal project @hazmeunafotoasi, Lorena Macías, has lifted her anonymity to develop the presentation ‘A meme brought me here: your portfolio can be where you don’t expect it’.
An expert in advertising and marketing, Lorena Macías explained how she identified a content with potential and set a strategy, which had an “uncontrolled growth” driven by the pandemic and which comments on the current influencer, to transform “a content that outrages into a fun content” and which “coins its own language that has been able to amplify the message through the audience itself”.

For Lorena Macías, “humour, keeping up to date, jumping on any viral news and trying to adapt it to a community” are some of the strategies and advice, and she recommended that Forum participants “never get bored, do what you enjoy, and be aware that not everyone is going to like you”, because this is how this market works. “There is a lot of work behind it”, she confessed, “from Monday to Sunday all year round, because in social networks there is no Christmas, there are no long weekends” and above all “have a thick skin”. Lorena Macías celebrated that “I love what I do and I am lucky to make a living from it”.

For his part, the experiential workshop ‘Creative thinking: projecting from the unexpected’ by the director of Communication at the ULPGC, Ignacio Bordes, served to “take participants out of their comfort zone” and learn to “walk in uncertainty”. As he pointed out, the workshop seeks to “challenge participants to understand uncertainty, accept it and receive it naturally”. Through “everyday concepts and objects”, he wanted to “provoke that novel situation that in some way surprises, and puts people at the centre”.
This workshop has focused on teamwork, to “walk around things, to create a challenge and look for that creative response”. With certain tools, Ignacio Bordes promotes “a series of tricks or challenges to value diver-people thinking”, which he defines as “key” and something that “has often been annulled in education”. As he stressed, “we are in times in which creativity or personal touch in new professions must finally be valued”.

Canarias Comunica 2023 is promoted and financed by the Cabildo de Gran Canaria; organised by Infecar; co-organised by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; with Cajasiete as official partner and the ULPGC and the Chamber of Commerce of Gran Canaria as collaborators.