The PSFK Conference was easily one of the best conference I’ve ever attended. And that’s saying a lot, considering I’ve been to quite a number both here in Singapore and abroad.

Like it or not, there’s a natural divide between PR agencies, marketing folks, advertising executives and everyday folk. We know that the marketing guys are after our wallets, not our welfare. Advertisements are often crafted to sell something we don’t need, or make something crappy appear like angel’s wings. So when attending conferences organised by corporations, rather than guys on the ground, I often enter with my antennae fully raised. It sometimes feels like I’m privy to new innovative tricks these slick advertising people have come up with to fool us all.

Not so with this conference. It felt authentic. At the end of the conference, we went up to Piers Fawkes, founder and CEO of PSFK. We wanted to thank him for letting the bunch of us bloggers get in for free.

You’d have expected savvy ad guys to at least work the gratitude angle, maybe ask us to write good things of the conference on the blog. Not Piers.

“Write what you liked about the conference. Or write about what you don’t. Send me the link!”

It’s not rocket science or anything, but the realisation that you have control over your product and not what people say about it separates the ones who understand the media environment we live in and the ones who are still hitting their head on a world gone by.

I’ll be posting up more stuff gleaned from the individual sessions. It’s liberating to know that Piers won’t mind sharing the knowledge from the conference. He’ll be putting up video clips from the conference on the PSFK website once they’re done editing it.

That’s more generous than pretty much any conference I’ve ever been to.