The energy at Advertising Week, which kicked off yesterday, is positively charged. We attended a number of sessions on Day 1 and some of the emerging, top trends we’ve taken away talk about the role of creatives, finding and keeping talent – both the creative and marketing – and marketing in a people-centric way.

On the creative conversation, we hosted a panel, “Connecting the Creative World: Exciting Changes in the Creative Community,”moderated by our vice president of products & community, Scott Belsky, who talked about creative meritocracy and the need for more creative attribution and recognition in this digital world where people pin, tumble and more without clear acknowledgements on original creation source. Scott simply thinks we need to ensure creatives get the credit for the great work they do. The conversation evolved into talent and how creative agencies should hire – whether it’s best to get a really great designer vs. a jack-of-all-trades and how to form creative teams for clients’ cross-platform needs.

The talk of talent weaved into other sessions, and in addition to Scott’s talk about modern creatives, we found ourselves having a parallel discussion related to marketers. We released a study, “Digital Distress: What Keeps Marketers Up at Night?” (below) and we uncovered that marketers aren’t feeling perfectly competent at their jobs – only 48% of digital marketers say they feel proficient while the stat for marketing generalists show they are even less confident. Compounding this confidence challenge is the fact that the study showed marketers think their industry has changed more in the past 2 years than that last 50!

From session to session, the topic of storytelling and connecting deeper with people are the hot topics. The consensus of course is that these are critically important. Twitter hosted a panel, “Inside the Social Soundtrack”, for example, that was all about Twitter Amplify, which inserts brands into moments that are resonating with consumers on its platform. BuzzFeed hosted a panel, “Storyteling in the Age of Social, Mobile and Video,” that went deep into the need for brands to be their own social newsrooms.

That is just Day 1, and we couldn’t even begin to cover it all. However, stay tuned Adobe & Advertising Week and also check out our data visualization that’s surfacing all #AWX convo for the latest.