What's going down at Dmexco

It’s that time of year again as the whiskers of the autumn tundra begin to whisper their way across Europe the sun dappled promenade of the Cannes Croisette is a distant memory….

It can only mean one thing for the intrepid marketer and that is the annual hop to Cologne for the monolith that is now Dmexco.

I’ve been attending for about the past ten years now..when our German contingent at Microsoft beckoned us to woo what was primarily then…..a core German constituency. I gave a number of colorful presentations but perhaps the standout one was in 2010 post World Cup when I gave a presentation on What the German football team can teach us about Digital Marketing. They didn’t win that year (Spain did) but the seeds of success were slow to blossom and they subsequently did conquer the world in 2014 so on the inverse perhaps digital marketing can teach other industries a thing or too….imagine

The one thing that is clear from Dmexco’s rise and rise is that ad tech and technology in general are transforming brands, business’s and lives. Tech trends have become indistinguishable from societal trends encapsulated none more so than in Apple’s new launches yesterday. What was once the environ of the IT press is now covered by all the media outlets. It matters…I’m not sure people know WHY it matters they just know it does…and that’s Dmexco….it matters

With over 50,000 + attendees Christian, Birgit & the rest of the team have done a fabulous job over the years from taking what was essentially an ad tech conference to a marketing event monolith with all the big hitters spending millions on their gaudy come hither palaces and every CMO to CTO attending and speaking. Like the strapline says this year…it really has been Lightening in the Age of Transformation.

So this year I’m doing my now obligatory Prophets Session where I’ll be closing out the show with what I see as the big Macro and Micro trends affecting our industry over the coming 12 months. I also like to call out a few names to give it some real spice…I got Marissa Mayer ousting spot on but was a little off on my timing with Elon Musk becoming Apple CEO…I still think that will happen….just a little further down the line when they really do have to get back into innovation….I mean….lets get rid of the home button and give an edge to edge OLED screen does not bowl me over with excitement….but they do it well and small things on that scale mean big things in people’s lives…

A sneak peak of my forecast and core themes that will be bubbling up over the next two days will be a focus on Blockchain and the shift from giving our data away to a central base or company to managing & tracking ourselves. The ability of a distributed ledger, unhackable, and authenticated will be cat nip to our industry as we deal with those pesky bedfellows of Viewability, Verification and Value. I’m not saying this will solve it all up but it will go some way trying to eradicate the fraud that is now pervasive within our business…when over a one third of all digital traffic is considered fraudulent this will be the digital Eliot Ness. Blockchain tech truly the next big paradigm shift in levelling the playing fields of business once again and is the only democratic technology that I can see usurping the digital duopoly giants.

The other big track I’ll dive into is Virtual currencies and the rise of the value conscious consumer. My Spidey sense is telling me that many of the business’s I deal with are still battening down hatches for a new global recession…I don’t think it will be as destructive as the last but people are concerned and cutting their talent and revenue cloth accordingly. At Unlockd the vagaries of fortune have kissed us lovingly over the last year as we pivoted 25 degrees to understand that whilst we are disrupting the advertising industry with our creative canvas the Value ( in digital currency ) we are giving back to the audience is the real juice in which they can exchange for streaming media products such as MTV Trax in the UK or our recently launched product around Loyalty points with Flybuys in Australia. The more ads and content you see the more Flybuys points you can redeem in store for real world goods. What is seen as loyalty today with simply be normalcy tomorrow

 The other two sessions I’m running are panels tackling some of the big subjects that affect EVERY brand. The first is on Voice as a Platform…having spent time over the years with the Cortana team establishing how we integrate brands into Chatbots/Ai assistants I truly believe every CMO must have a voice strategy and by extension a chatbot strategy. I separate the two because they do exist autonomously yet they are indissobly wedded in every way. When 20% of every search is now voice activated I’ll be jumping into the current state of play and how quickly were evolving with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and to quell that battle an agency to give some perspective via iProspect.

The other session is a bear of a subject and one that in 35 mins I conscious we don’t just scratch the surface of. This will focus around the missing link in the mobile experience. I’ve always been a big believer in technology learning to be more human rather than humans learning more about tech and I’ll be asking the panel to define what mobility is, what are the challenges business’s and the audience face in a mobile first world and how we overcome what in my opinion is still an inferior experience. Helping me craft these nuggets of wisdom will be a veritable bevvy of companies from Spotify to OpenX, Fetch to Criteo and as it’s me we can’t go by without some creative jabba so we have SublimeSkinz to talk about how we can make that work

So I’m looking fwd to the next two days of intense wandering and discovery of companies I have never heard of in fractural business’s I will probably never use, content stimulation from the big dogs of our world who will use this stage to set the agenda for our industry and perhaps…perhaps the odd stein to lubricate the cogs.

Look out for my follow up blog post Dmexco on what actually went down.

If you’re here..enjoy and I hope I see you…if not I hope this gives you a little insight into the Lightening in a the Age of Transformation…could definitely be a tagline for a Hollywood movie that one

On Guard

JC