Fresh off the Eurostar from Lille (Northern France), today was my first day ever at ad:tech London, the event for digital marketing in the UK!
Located in the beautiful Olympia National Hall, built in 1886 and made of iron, brick and glass, ad:tech is organized in two levels. On the ground floor, an exhibition area with 200+ booths and 6 seminar rooms with presentations performed by exhibitors. On the gallery level, an international conference is held in two large conference rooms (with an entrance fee on a conference or day-basis).
The baseline for this year’s edition is “what really matters in digital”. Nike’s brand communications director for global football Ed Elworthy opened the international conference by sharing his vision for the future.
The conference then breaked out in two tracks: Social Media and Data & Content. I decided to attend the Social Media track. Marc de Swaan Arons, chairman of EffectiveBrands and co-author of “The Global Brand CEO”, explained how social media forces corporations to rethink their brand purpose and total customer experience. By clarifying and communicating a purposeful positioning to their employees, corporations will ensure social media readiness, where every employee will become a company’s ambassador by their interactions with customers on social medias or elsewhere.
Luca Benini, Europe managing director for Buddy Media, explained then that social is the natural evolution of the Web. If you take Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, our basic needs on the Web have been fulfilled by search engine companies like Google. To fulfill higher needs in the hierarchy, that is to say belonging, esteem and self-actualization, new companies have emerged like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. According to Benini, social has a powerful impact on your business and is reshaping the way we have to consider consumers. In the past, customers where mainly perceived on the direct revenue generated. In the social era, customers have also to be considered as brand advocates. 90 % of all purchases are indeed subject to social influence. On average 3,2 visitors are generated per share. It is also predicted that Social Commerce should amount to 30 G$ worldwide in 2015. On an analytical standpoint, social commerce should be measured by revenue generated, products sold and customers acquired by sharing on social medias (for instance : average revenue per share, average conversion per share and average visits per share). The morning sessions were concluded by a case study of social experiments performed on Philips Wake Up Light (http://www.facebook.com/philipshealthyliving). Thanks to several initiatives on social medias, Philips was able to increase market share by 17 % in the Netherlands.
The afternoon conferences were organized on two tracks: Privacy and Performance Marketing. I did attend a mix of conferences in the two tracks, along with some seminars in the ground floor.
Dave Williams’ conference on Facebook Marketing KPIs was pretty packed. Williams clearly stated in his introduction that Facebook should be used as an engagement platform and not a ROI platform. By advertising on Facebook, you should consider yourself at a cocktail party and not at a yard sale. People are not browsing on Facebook with an immediate intent to buy. Facebook is an operating system of ads based on intent and social graph. In the near future, this should also power mobile, display, search and video ad delivery. Facebook’s penetration is quite different depending on the countries : 48,2 % in the UK, 36,4 % in Belgium, 33,5 % in France, 30,5 % in Italy and 29,5 % in Germany. In terms of KPIs, the presentation focused primarly on CPSA (Cost per Social Action) and the different levers to optimize it : frequency, creativity and impression volumes of ads. Facebook wds perform better when they have a social context (recommended by friends). A case study of Facebook Marketing on Domino Pizza’s in the UK was briefly presented with an increase of 440 % in the overall fan base, cost fan acquisition was reduced by 73 % and Domino’s Pizza UK sales via Facebooj increased 300 %.
In the privacy track, a panel with Dave Evans from the Information Commissioner’s Office, Greg Smith from Evidon and Alex Fowler from Mozilla, was discussing “what to do privacy laws mean for brands?”. Greg Smith emphasized the opt-out capabilities of Evidon, a company specializing in powering the Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising of the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Evidon created the Open Data Partnership (ODP), which allows consumers to manage their online profiles, and it operates the popular Ghostery browser extension, giving people even more control over their online experiences. On the Mozilla side, Fowler’s stressed the recurring improvements in the Firefox browser to better communicate to uses what companies are doing with their data. However, privacy compliance rests with data owner and the party who has collected the data. In recent updates of Firefox, it is possible to activate do not track features directly into the browser. All panelists agreed that we need to continue to educate the public and the industry more. 85 % of Google users don’t opt out even if Google provides this functionality in the preferences. They concluded that we are still at the beginning of providing transparency with preferences management and there is still a long way to go to provide full transparency.
The last conference I attended was the one of Nate Elliott, vice president at Forrester Research titled “In the age of the customer, only customer-obsessed companies can survive disruption”. His take was that completion has changed forever in recent years. After the age of manufacturing (1900-1960), the age of distribution (1960-1990), the age of information (1990-2010) , we have now moved into the age of the customer since 2010. With smart mobile devices, social technology, persuasive video and cloud computing services, empowered customers have washed away previous sources of dominance. To survive in the new era, you should shift your focus to become customer-obsessed, which implies to shift your budget to seek realtime insights (and build products customers will embrace) as well as to spend on customer experience and service. Companies should obsess about repeat business over new, and prioritize end users overs channels. Marketing should also be shifted away from one-way ads to useful interactive content. Disruption in your business is the new normal.
The day was concluded by an impressive ad:tech networking extravaganza at the Gallery level. A great opportunity to meet other people in the digital marketing community in the UK, as well as bloggers from France!
Christophe Asselin, head of ad:tech UK, was pretty satisfied by the attendance of this first day : “Despite the continuing economic difficulty, the digital industry is growing and ad:tech recorded our busiest show this year and we are delighted to beat the ambient morosity. Come and cheer up with us.”
See you tomorrow for the summary of my second day at ad:tech London!
