Trends and Themes from Digital Shoreditch 2015

Jim Wolff, Head of Digital at Leith, was asked by Interactive Scotland to head down to Digital Shoreditch earlier in the year to report back the emerging trends and themes in digital creativity.

Running over five days in the heart of London’s Tech City (or Silicon Roundabout if you prefer), Digital Shoreditch was bigger than ever this year. Bringing the creative, tech and entrepreneur community together, each day covered a different main theme — from making and growing startup ideas earlier in the week, to the future convergence of new technologies and systems on the Wednesday, and how to connect with and reach audiences in an ever-changing media landscape towards the end.

Here are some of the highlights and trends that he picked out…

Content may be king, but people need to notice it first.

The first session of the Connect day kicked off with Stanislas Magniant from Coca-Cola raising a theme that came up again and again: attention is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity, and brands needs to work harder than ever to get it. With ever more platforms, channels and devices vying for eyespace, and an increasing deluge of media to fill them, content creators need to keep upping their game to make stuff that people notice and stick with.

Another point that came up is the need to ‘pay for play’, or the need for some kind of media spend to get reach. With Facebook cutting back what your own fans can see, and other social platforms supporting themselves by giving preferential treatment to fee payers, it feels like gone are the days of a random hit. Nowadays, as ever, money talks.

Startups, agencies and corporates: the dream love triangle.

A big chunk of Thursday covered speakers and panels about startups, agencies and big corporations working together and learning from each other. From OgilvyLabs’s work with startups like Givey (an app to increase charity lending) and AppearHere (an ‘AirBnB for retail space’), to incubation projects like Unilever’s Foundry, it seems we’re seeing an increase in collaboration between different types of organisations. Startups need to scale, corporates need to innovate and agencies need to stay relevant, so each can help out the other. With Sainsbury’s, William Hill and BBH all running their own innovation schemes, it’s likely that we’ll see more ‘labs’ popping up in the future.

There’s never been a better time to have a proven idea.

In a similar vein to collaborative incubation schemes, it’s looking like accelerator programmes are really, well, accelerating. From FinTech (financial tech) accelerators like Level 39, to MadTech (marketing and advertising tech) accelerators like Collider, there’s no lack of support for new ideas. Another growing field is CitiTech, like the Cognicity scheme in London which aims to get startups to revolutionise Canary Wharf. Soon every sector niche will have an accelerator supporting new businesses — it seems all they need is a decent prefix for -tech.

Some of these schemes are looking for fresh startups, some are looking for more established ‘scale-ups’, who have a proven idea and are ready to grow. But what they’re all looking for is the ‘goldilocks moment’ to back a new business — when it’s ‘just right’ to get involved. Worth keeping in mind when getting any applications or pitches ready.

Creating value needn’t cost more.

One of the highlights (for me anyway) was Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy’s talk, loosely about behavioural economics and how to persuade people to like your service / buy your stuff / change what they do. Drawing from Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, he gave a number of examples about how appealing to people’s emotional side, rather than their rational, logical side, can help brands connect better with their audiences, without necessarily having to spend their way into being liked. From the infamous Diamond Shreddies campaign, to the way Five Guys burgers give you extra fries in the bottom of your bag, it was a masterclass in demonstrating how a little love goes a long way.

In brand vs product, brand wins.

In an excellent panel hosted by Contagious on Friday, with panellists from Rapha clothing, Karmarama and The Partners, there was a heated discussion over what’s more important: brand or product. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a panel mostly made up of marketeers, the answer came down mainly on the side of getting a brand right first and everything else will follow. Particularly in a world when tech is becoming less of a differentiator, brand becomes something that will truly set a business apart. But perhaps even more importantly is understanding culture. If you understand the culture of your audience, and build a brand and product around it, then you’ll truly create something of benefit to the people you’re aiming to serve.

Video’s getting bigger. And shorter.

A common theme of the Broadcast day on the Friday was how short-form video is set to explode (if it hasn’t already). Will Saunders, the BBC’s digital creative director, took us through a look at how Auntie Beeb is responding to this trend, like with the BBC Trending service that applies some journalistic rigour to hot social topics, and the BBC Taster site that roadtests new innovations and ideas in a labs-like space. Worth watching the BBC’s own take on the value of short-form video, Get Shorty, which was used to sell in the whole trend to the upper echelons of the organisation. Let’s hope they got it, as short-form video isn’t going away.

Social video is mobile-first. And real-time.

Finally, there was more on the Broadcast day about what makes social video shareable. Unruly’s Cat Jones gave an excellent insight into the science behind their ShareRank algorithm, which has tracked 1.3 million video views and now claims to be able to predict (with 80% accuracy) just how shareworthy a piece of film is likely to be. It was good to see how both psychological responses and social motivations affect whether someone clicks that share button after viewing. And how the peak of shares usually happens on day two — so why it’s important to invest early in media spend if you want to get reach. Also worth noting that now YouTube only amounts to 25% of total video views — the rest is on the open web, so worth factoring that into a campaign if you want to extend reach.

Obviously this only a snapshot of what took place within the two days I was there, let alone across the full five days. With multiple rooms, hundreds of speakers and a few different venues, it was impossible to see all of it. But well worth a visit next year. Or maybe we should just do our own version in Scotland. Watch this space…