Live @ Web Summit
I am in Ireland today for the much vaunted Web Summit event taking place in Dublin.
It is billed as the show “where the tech world meets” and it’s hard to argue with that. There are 10k attendees expected from all over the world and it’s literally packed with tech startups, all vying for the attention of potential investors, analysts, influencers, early adopters and frankly anyone who will listen.
I’ll be updating this blog regularly throughout the day as I pick up interesting nuggets of information. But first I should tip my hat to blogsconnections.com who organised for my media pass to the Summit. Check out their service if you are interested in connecting with advertisers (or bloggers if you work in advertising).
What have I seen so far?
Brant McLean from Tumblr
The future of the web is content creation and curation.
If you want to engage in this space, first find out what language the natives are using. Look for opportunities to join the conversation and create original content that matches the natives wants and needs.
Brant cited a campaign from Lexus that looked particularly interesting. I would share a link, but frankly it’s nt that easy to find.
Ben Jones from AKQA
I had to feel for Ben* because his slides didn’t work, but he ad-libbed beautifully even dropping to knock out a few pres ups. He has been by far the more engaging speaker so far.
Ben is the CEO of digital advertising agency AKQA and he spoke a lot about how the disruption of digital is challenging the way we must think about business and business models.
He quoted three of AKQAs 10 core principles including:
- Remove complexity
- Harness emotion
- Simplicity is key
I loved the WWF app he demo’d. It’s a very interactive example of how to engage with people’s emotions to generate a response and it looks stunning.
I enjoyed his take on using data in real time to affect how you treat customers.
Nichola Mendelsohn, Head of EMEA, Facebook
Nichola’s message was very clear, it’s all about mobile:
- “mobile is not the future it is already the dominant platform”
- “prime time is now all the time”
- “20% of all the time people spend on mobile is on facebook or instagram”
- “mobile is the model T of today”
If you have yet to setup your blog to be at the very least responsive then it’s time you did. Actually come along to our next meetup where our friends at Mobiloud will show you how to build a mobile app for your blog in a few easy steps.
John Phelan, Halcyon Business Solutions
“Content is king, technology is the tool for delivery, but you need to bring both together to be successful”
James Parton, Twilio
James talked about how marketers should engage with developers and the developer community, using Twilio as a case study. He called their strategy ‘enabling and celebrating the doers’ and said it is no longer enough to just buy beer and pizza.
Brands need to get involved and demonstrate you are all in when it comes to supporting and empowering developers for example through providing tech experts to help at hackathons, or even providing seed funding. If you are organising hack days or other tech events, Twilio is the team you want to get in touch with then.
James also recommended hackday manifesto for event organisers too.
According to James there are 18.2 million developers worldwide and this number is growing by 6% each year and forecast to continue to do so at this pace for the next six years.
I also liked Twilio’s “no shennanigans” approach i.e. no hidden costs, strongs attached etc. I’ve heard this message twice today, from James and Ben at AKQA too. It’s not just developers that want more transparency, it seems we all do and this change is being driven by digital / social.
Jon Orainger, Founder and CEo, Shutterstock
Jon talked about data driven disruption and how Shutterstock captures extraordinary amounts of data on their users and their use of shutterstock.com. 1 terabyte of data every single day in fact.
The insights and analysis of their data is made open and available to all of their team to make ongoing agile improvements to how their site works, split testing everything from the colour of a button to the layout of pages.
“the more you do with data, the more you collect, the more you will be able to compete”
Head of Brand, Guinness (name to come)
This speaker covered how Guinness is evolving its marketing to take into account multiple platforms. They no longer start out with the view that TV is the first port of call, everything is media neutral.
At Guinness their marketing must fit into the FACE model:
- Flair
- Agility
- Consumer Insights
- Execution
It’s increasingly about great content. You have to tell a great story in an engaging way:
“be relevant and topical, be tuned into the zeitgeist, be current and engaging”.
“digital is now where great brands are being built”.
Gary Vaynerchuck
I just caught the end of Gary’s session which is a shame as his style was electric. Without a doubt he had the most energy of any speaker I saw today.
The most useful sound bite I took from Mr Vaynerchuck is “it’s people that will make the key difference to a startup”.
He sounded off about people needing to work hard and work smart to be a success with their startup, you can’t do one without the other and make it.
NASDAQ Bell
All that before Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny rang in the opening bell for the NASDAQ stock exchange…
That’s it from the first day of #WebSummit. More to come tomorrow.
* actually all of the speakers so far as the AV at this event is laughably bad e.g embedded videos are not playing with audio, calendar reminders popping up on the main screen. School boy errors for event managers here I’m afraid.
** All names and links will be checked after the Summit for accuracy.
