On the 5th of October, we brought our advisory board members together for an online discussion for the final time this year in 2022! In a brief one-hour virtual meeting, we first reviewed some of the key findings in our 2022 summits and then discussed recent conference experiences and interesting topics for future events.
We have had quarterly advisory board meetings this year, inspiring us to deliver a more beneficial event for all participants – delegates, speakers and partners. With all the insights that we had collected through this board meeting, new ideas and improvements for both current and future summit designs were generated.
During this advisory board meeting, we started out by sharing three exciting findings from our most recent summits.
- Content is key, and these days they need to be Short Videos. Whether you think it works for your brand or not, you need to find a way to make it happen.
- People are still very keen on virtual offerings: virtual events or meetings. People are adapting to a hybrid measure and love seeing the silver lining of making both elements work in-person and virtual.
- Some form of e-commerce website integrated solution is on the horizon for MarTech. Currently, the focus is more on siloed platforms, but there will be some forms of convergence down the road, likely on the path of customer centricity.
Moving on, we split the meeting into three breakout rooms to dig deeper into the conversations on conference formats, topic buzzwords, and mobile applications. Here you can see highlights for each discussion point from all three rooms.
Q.1 Event format-wise – have you experienced any other conferences in the past year that you have really liked – as a speaker or as an attendee?
Zsuzsanna Blau (Head of Digital Marketing Campaigns, Nokia) shared that she prefers and expects some unbiased case studies, not a one-way presentation. This is in order to hear how others do things, which you can then relate and implement into your everyday work. And if the event size is in the low hundreds with lots of conversational breakout sessions, it would then be even more helpful for such contextual sharing to happen.
Dave Chadderton (Marketing Director, Homes for Students) said he enjoyed the intimate settings with smaller groups. He shared: “If I need a solution, I can go out and find it; I also don’t have time for all the pitches being sent to me one by one.”
And there are some conferences with terms and conditions that if you didn’t show up at the event, you need to have 3 or 5 one-to-one meetings, or you need to pay. These settings are aiming to do the thing that MarTech summits should be doing, to have conversations in a smaller group, but that setting might be slightly obtrusive.
Dave also mentioned that Conference organizers should tailor and bring out the smaller and cost-effective businesses as most companies want to find out more about the smaller businesses with solutions. He would want to see platforms being provided for these companies in networking sponsorship opportunities (“lower hanging fruit”) such as dining sessions (companies sponsored restaurants happening simultaneously).
Richard De Villa (Head of Marketing, UK and Europe, Malaysia Airlines) likes the tree-planting The MarTech Summit has done before. There was another conference where people could build a water filter. Such activities are about the purpose and being purposeful. He also mentioned about providing an avenue to participants and attendees with meeting opportunities (1-2-1) with speakers that is less formally structured (Not “Hard sale”).
Chelsea Perino (MD, Global Marketing and Communications, The Executive Centre) talked about a speed dating-like networking session at a conference she attended before covid. The rule is that you fill in your profile information, and then you can see all about a hundred participants’ profiles. And the three-hour session was split into 12 fifteen-minutes slots so that everyone could book meetings with each other. Suppose you matched with someone who also picked you. In that case, you two will be allocated a time slot with a table number from 1-60. According to your booked schedule, you will have 12 one-to-one conversations during the whole session.
She also shared some tips for the last presentation: Have a 1-hour slot but only use 25mins as presentation. The rest will be for asking an open-ended question to build a word cloud to allow people to engage, interact and talk. (Recommended app: MENTIMETER)
Faisal Laljee (Chief Marketing Officer, expondo GmbH) said he attended a virtual conference, but it’s a full-day event, and people really don’t have the time for that. We were easily distracted by other work and ended up watching them on-demand (which was actually quite nice). The videos and content are great as on-demand, but there are still irreplaceable parts of in-person events, such as networking experiences.
Vincent Leung (Global Head of Digital Brand Marketing, Lenzing Group) attended a Hong Kong fashion and textile conference, a selective event that only directors and managers levels can attend. It had an intimate format, so the conversations were more insightful and could really generate great ideas.
Tanya Manyan (General Manager, Marketing & Communications, Product and Partnerships, PICA Group) said she like breakout rooms with different talk topics that you can choose what you’re most interested in. And also case study-based topics rather than a sales pitch. “I want to know more than the ‘practical advice’, but the whole story, the challenges and how they were solved, how was the outcome. And I also like that if I can download the resources after the talks, so you don’t need to take notes, can just enjoy listening and getting the key takeaways.”
Dr Sheela Siddappa (Principal Data Scientist, Kyndryl) shared her thought that people might say now they all want in-person, but actually, the hybrid form also works.
And also in some talks, the speaker can also share a list of colleagues’ email or LinkedIn profile so that if the audience is interested, they can reach out to them.
Victoria Usher (Vice President, Marketing Communications, JCB International (Europe) Ltd.) thought gathering people in a smaller space and time was brilliant. Especially the creativity when meeting different people across the business, such as data scientists, marketers, and project managers. People are working towards the same goal but with different proficiencies, so discussing in such groups makes you think creatively.
Nikki Taylor (Direct Marketing Growth Strategy Asia Pacific, UPS) shared that sometimes in the peer level meetings, you would meet someone you knew before, but somehow you lost the connection. But when you meet again, then you can reconnect. These kinds of peer networking opportunities are gold.
Mike Borrelli (Global Functional Lead & Sr. Product Owner – Marketing Technology – Activation Platforms, Henkel) shared his experience at Lego’s event. They distributed the assignments of Lego bricks to the virtual attendees so that virtual and physical spaces presented the product simultaneously and had interactive tasks to do throughout the conference. People onsite can see the photos of the virtual audience’s works they built online. It’s a great approach to connecting live and virtual audiences.
For the on-demand, it’s pretty luxurious to go back and watch the whole one-hour session. If you can give me just 5 minutes of that for the exact information I need, or just for a sneak peek, that would be useful.
And he also states gamification for people to talk to strangers, and the metaverse future are also worthy of our attention.
Ged Quinn (Chief Marketing Officer & Senior Partner, Mercer) said: “sometimes in my industry, what I want is only to get information. I just want to know what peer organisations are doing, what are the latest trends, what are the case studies, the result of survey, and so on. “… “I used to travel a lot, but now it’s all virtual and on-demand. There’s very little interaction, but it’s really helpful and fits around my schedule.”
Yet he further mentioned that the big thing now is the explosion of choice. And we all need to think about the event’s objectives for speaking, networking or just a deep dive into is for.
Q.2 What are the buzzwords to deep dive into at our events? The future-facing topics where there are so many unknowns feel the most powerful, but what are they?
Virge Nielsen (Head of Digital Marketing Solutions, Accent Group) said: “We’re so over about the cookie apocalypse. It’s not going to come better. I think the thing now is how do we capitalise on both streams. We’re not going to give up the cookies. How do we not get stumbled between a slowing down motion on the rescue plan and at the same time still making money from what we can make.”
Also, she said the talk of generational differences has also been told too much. The trend should now be individualism and personalising experiences, like customised advertising. We should stop thinking in generations but about the individuals and, at the same time, not impede their privacy.
Evan Januli (Head of Marketing, TokoTalk) shared that in the Indonesian business environment people are saying “Winter is Coming” that big funds are shut down, marketing costs are being cut, and marketing are asked to be more cost-efficient. But for him, some concepts like branding are very different in this scenario.
Mike Borrelli (Global Functional Lead & Sr. Product Owner – Marketing Technology – Activation Platforms, Henkel) mentioned the “age-appropriate law” that is in the discussion stage in California, which is crucial for future generations. Creating a safer place for different age groups who are a bit more vulnerable is vital. Maybe even writing new legal terms for kids. But that will potentially damage more user experience, like higher blockers entering websites.
Akina Ho (Head of Digital Transformation & Innovation, The Great Eagle Company) states that Web 3.0 is definitely important. In the talks of the new waves of Web 3, metaverse and NFTs, marketing is built in and driving the directions of your products and strategies.
Federico Brandi (Chief Marketing Officer, Roojai.com) said that he thinks that short videos and TikTok are really crucial, especially in the Southeast Asian Markets that he currently works in. Not only for the younger generation, but also for the potential to create informative, short and accessible content that can be equally impactful.
Vincent Leung (Global Manager – Digital Marketing Lead, Lenzing Group) shared that “marketing returning investments”, “KPI Metrics”, and “Data Protection/Security” are the three buzzwords he thought were important. For fairly new marketing campaigns like NFTs, no one has talked about a proper ROI. And senior level managers need to know more about the true meaning behind KPIs, so digital metrics of KPIs would be really informative and helpful. As for the new development of GDPR, as Google is being phased out and the tracking is now universal, some issues do not apply to GDPR compliance.
Q.3 Can you let us know any / one event (web)app you have used onsite at an event and enjoyed?
Zsuzsanna Blau (Head of Digital Marketing Campaigns, Nokia) said that only if it is a large conference and you would get lost without an app, like the complicated breakout session and location etc., otherwise she would not download the app.
Chelsea Perino (MD, Global Marketing and Communications, The Executive Centre) agreed with Zsuzsanna and thought a lot of the functions could be webpage based and with a QR code, which would be much easier. But there was one event app she found useful when there were many different tracks, and you could arrange your own schedule in that app to follow different sessions.
Tanya Manyan (General Manager, Marketing & Communications, Product and Partnerships, PICA Group) shared an app for the networking function that you can give your detailed profile, and it will connect you with other members with similar profiles. And it has a gaming system that encourages participants to interact with each other to gain points, which facilitates engagement.
Great appreciation for all our advisory board members, those who shared their precious insights, and all who have supported us in various ways. Thank you for reading this report, and looking forward to our meetings in 2023!
If you find other board members’ thoughts inspiring and want to discuss more with them about it, please feel free to find each other’s LinkedIn profile through the shared attendance list, or browse BEETc’s Advisory Board webpage: Advisory Board – Home | BEETc.
Team BEETc
