dvm360's Marnette Falley honored as a top woman in media

Marnette Falley, dvm360's group content director, was recently named one of Folio's Top Women in Media.dvm360 is pleased to announce that Content Director Marnette Falley was recently named one of 2018's Top Women in Media by Folio magazine, a media industry heavyweight. 

The Folio Top Women in Media Awards recognizes the most influential women in media. Falley was named a "change-maker," which Folio defines as a woman who's successfully altering the course of her brand or the industry for the better and who's innovating in new ways and guiding her business into new markets.

Falley has been part of the UBM Animal Care team for more than 20 years. Currently serving as executive creative director, she has in the last year overseen the consolidation of content and marketing into a unified creative team, rebranded and repositioned a legacy event and re-imagined the experience for veterinary professionals receiving continuing education.

Key to Falley's approach to managing change is the adoption of new ideas. For example, at each Fetch dvm360 event (held three times per year), the dvm360 team delivers hundreds of hours of continuing education. Historically, the conference-along with its competitors-took essentially the same approach, which was to have smart, engaging experts deliver 50-minute presentations that are absorbed at different rates by attendees with varying degrees of interest.

However, there've been significant advances in understanding of adult learning. For example, research shows that even the smartest adult learners can maintain attention for only about 15 minutes at a time. RACE, the accrediting body in the veterinary market, offers CE for 50-minute sessions.

Here are key steps Falley and her team took to change this paradigm:

Facilitation. Fetch dvm360 conference sessions have two leaders: an expert speaker and an expert facilitator. One takes responsibility for information, and the other focuses on engagement and adult learning principles.

Doodling. Research shows that supplementing notes with drawing dramatically increases retention. To be specific, if you only take written notes, you'll remember 10 percent of what you heard 72 hours later. But if you also doodle, you'll remember 65 percent. So Falley spearheaded the reorganization of conference materials, with a heavy emphasis on the encouragement of doodling during and after sessions.

"We're on a path to creating an educational experience that no other educator in the market is delivering," Falley says.

Conference extensions. To help veterinary professionals implement new ideas that reflect what they learn, the conference helps attendees focus on a few areas they want to change or problems they want to solve and offers tools that help them get to the next step of that goal. For example, if an attendee sitting in a lecture on dermatology gets inspired to do a better job helping clients understand the importance of consistent flea control, they'll find a free client handout in the app they can use to arm their team.

This year's Folio Top Women in Media winners included leaders from Bloomberg Media, Meredith Corporation, The Atlantic, Condé Nast and Harvard Business Review. See a full list of this year's honorees here.