Get Your DMEXCO On
Welcome to Cologne, longtime home to the DMEXCO conference and exhibition. DMEXCO is the premier window into the media and marketing goings-on across Europe and the broader EMEA region, with a focus on being ultra-transactional. Held every year at the sprawling K?lnmesse convention center on the east side of the Rhine river which splits the city in two, DMEXCO has added even more stages and content for the 40,000-plus attendees who descend on Cologne.
The World of Agencies aims to super-serve discussion of pain points and opportunities alike for the legion of agencies that serve clients across the globe. Speakers hail from such companies as Ogilvy, Microsoft Advertising and independent integrated agency Decoded Advertising. And you won’t want to miss the Demo Arena or the Future Parks (there are two of them) to get your fill of bleeding edge technology on display. Finally, the all-new CVC Conference has DMEXCO taking a new path for investors this year. It’s an intensive half-day conference taking place on Sept. 11 that focuses on start-up investments, from Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Mixed Reality, Smart Technologies and Mobility to IoT and Blockchain.
Meanwhile, the main stages will feature industry luminaries such as Sir Martin Sorrell, who continues to take on the agency holding company establishment (which he had a huge hand in building) with his upstart startup S4 Capital, as well as Luis di Como of Unilever, Marco Bertozzi of Spotify, Vice’s Dominique Delporte, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, and other execs from Snap, Nestle, and Pinterest, to name just a few.
Trust—trust in media, trust in privacy, trust in brands—will be a major thematic vein throughout the conference. The topic of GDPR, which is just over a year old in Europe, has already sent shockwaves of impact through any company with a digital footprint that interacts with consumers. As Dominik Matyka, chief advisor of DMEXCO, noted in a recent column in Adweek, data privacy officers have had to handle more than 280,000 cases, and generated nearly 60 million Euros in fines. Any company that isn’t taking the global ramifications of GDPR seriously could find itself in a hot spot sometime down the line. (Though it’s not directly related, Monday’s news of a gigantic antitrust investigation targeting Google signals that issues around concentration of power, and the abuse of that power that sometimes comes with it, are going to be taken much more seriously.)
The fact is, digital lies at the root of all media, marketing and creative work. Despite the challenges it faces, and the questions around it, the digital era has ushered in opportunity like the business world has never experienced. And the best place to gain insight and understanding of the major issues is DMEXCO. I’ll be covering some of the topics and conversation from DMEXCO for the next two days. One caveat: I will only attend English-language sessions, since my German doesn’t go far beyond Guten Tag and Danke.
Finally, if you’re in Cologne and have an extra moment of time, do cross the Rhine to the western side and stroll along the riverside’s row of restaurants, stroll the shopping zone (which is car-free) or head up to the Dom cathedral, one of the largest and finest in all Europe.
Danke.