14 Trends Emerging from The Web Summit

The Web Summit is the largest event in Ireland for the tech industry. In a mere four years, it has grown from under 400 people to over 20,000 attendees this year and has expanded in its diversity to include summits including The Music Summit, The Food Summit, Cinematic and Sport Summit.

As we enter its final day we take a look at what its all about? According to its’ Founder Paddy Cosgrave; “this year the event will focus on the ‘Internet of Everything’ and focus on and examine the ubiquity of tech in everyday life”. For many The Web Summit did just exactly that — focus on everything — from a scale perspective some say it has become too big.

Here are the top 14 emerging marketing trends from The Web Summit

1. Mobility is Crippling Tracking & the End of the Cookie Monster

Whether you attended The Web Summit or not, most people will have heard the ironic failure of the WiFi going down. One of the many reasons given was that even though they were ‘prepared’ for an audience of 20,000 people, they weren’t prepared for the fact that most people were on at least two or three devices, bringing expected users up to 40,000 or 60,000.

Multi-device use and new ways of tracking consumers across platforms is emerging; to capture the consumer on their mobile throughout the day, then onto their desktop or between browsers and apps and across operating systems like Android and Apple. Many talked about how online advertising is becoming obsolete as cookie blocking becomes the norm for consumers. Marketers have until now struggled with device recognition and device-recognition ‘IDs’ will become the way of the future as cookies (which are increasingly being blocked by the user on the desktop and even more-so on mobile) decline. With device recognition, for the very first time marketers will get a truly holistic customer view.

2. Social Proof

Marc Jones, CTO of SoftLayer, an IBM company, said that marketing and sales are using social data to understand what exactly your customers needs or issues are is the way forward. In his talk, he gave an interesting example of where a company, who sold fryers at a cost of $50,000 per machine, tracked conversations on social media e.g. searching for terms like “soggy fries”. After they collected the data, they then went to that mentioned venue and used social proof to demonstrate why they needed to change.

3. Globalisation-First Design

It appears that startups are being taught to think big first, to consider how they will go into different countries — different languages — from the onset rather than later on. Too many organisations — including Twitter and Facebook have had to do this afterwards, with big overheads on hiring localisation teams. It is far more effective in terms of scalability to set up the infrastructure from the onset.

However that leads into the counter-argument at The Summit, that the world is not our customer and in a targeted data-driven world, the idea that everybody is your customer is dangerous thinking.

4. Live Social Commerce

Companies like Twitter have a mantra around ‘marketing in the moment’, but it has gone beyond that now to receiving social transactions in real time. There are a few organisations talking about how they are interacting with customers online and making transactions — not just marketing — in the moment.

5. Google is Irrelevant

There will be many marketers who will disagree with this next statement.

Many presenters noted the end of Google from a search perspective and that Facebook, YouTube (yes this is still Google) and other social networks are the way forward.

According to Ian White from Sailthru we’re “seeing a movement away from Google and the death of the homepage”. It has never been more critical to get the right content in front of the right user. People are much less loyal to a media brands and what they’ll be loyal to is what they’re interest in.

6. The “Sexy” Data Scientist

Data is still en vogue and the Data Scientist is the “sexiest job of the 21st century” according to Rachel Schutt who is Chief Data Scientist at News Corp. According to a number of articles she provided as examples, the job was first coined at Facebook and LinkedIn and shortly adopted by Google, and now companies the world over.

7. Media Haven’t got it Right

It is clear from every journalist and media representative on stage that when discussing their future plans, they still haven’t figured out the model for media yet, it’s still influx. Almost all media organisations stated that they were in a trial period and things are shifting but they need to work it out. Finding a sustainable business model for journalism and the publishing industry is proving more difficult than first thought; they know they have to be on digital, they just don’t know how yet. According to The Guardian’s Head of Digital, Tanya Cordrey, print has been going up recently and physical readership of their newspaper has increased by around 40%. That said, she admitted that ‘’print is only headed in one direction’’.

8. Crowdsourcing Has a New Edge

Former RTE Foreign Correspondent Mark Little has launched an exciting new company — Storyful — which was bought out by News Corp late last year. The model will fundamentally change the media industry. Since socials inception, the power of the media has been in the hands of the consumer. Storyful embraces that by verifying social stories which will start putting a lot more accuracy — and therefore trust — in social and online news.

“If you’re not harnessing the power of the crowd, you’re going to fail” says Little. Unless you understand that business model, you’ll miss out, you have to make yourself relevant again. The power of social lies within the consumers hands; they don’t need media any more and as soon as companies “get that” then that’s when they’ll grow.

9. Augmented & Virtual Reality

According to Jonathan Cloonan. ‎Director of Partnerships at GroupM Entertainment the “concept of augmented and virtual reality are only going to get bigger”. Oculus Rift, the 3D Gaming company, did a demonstration on stage, and quite frankly reports from The Summit were that people were a little underwhelmed. The demonstration was noted as taking a step back in time to watch a demo of Playstation's first generation games, at best. This brings the question as to whether 3D is still in a gimmicky play or whether life-changing marketing ideas will stem from it.

10. Whether Good or Bad Quality — Content Reigns King

There were many contradictions across stages over The Summit, particularly yesterday. Sean Moriarty, from Demand Media debated that it is all about the high production quality and ‘if you’re not pushing quality content out there then it’s not worth it’.

“Quality will squeeze out scaled content over time” says Moriarty. However in an earlier session entitled, “New Media, New Narrative” President of FullScreen, Ezra Cooperstein argued that ‘in the age of the immediate, audiences don’t care about the quality of the content’ and he discussed in terms of handheld devices vs a production studio, that handheld will win as the priority is around the immediacy that it gets to the audience in rather than the quality.

11. The New Age of Brand

Social and new media are opening up the doors of more organisations getting recognised for their authentic content rather than their brand. Consumers are going to gravitate towards the content they want to view rather than the well-known brand. That said, brands matter more than ever before because the signal to noise ratio is getting bigger each year. Marketers will have to create a brand that people will gravitate towards and it’s not about exploiting the latest distribution opportunity.

12. Rage Against the Machine

Throughout the conference, many presenters talked about the shift towards robotics — Hoovers, self-driving cars etc. However all were saying in a man versus the machine world, that humans are reluctant to let go of control to the machine. Brad Templeton, Chair of Computing & Networks at Singularity University — who received a standing ovation from a select few in the audience for his insightful presentation — said that humans would prefer to ‘get run over by a drunk than to let machine take over driving’. He also systematically deducted any rational for not going with machines due to policies to make no doubt in attendees minds that robotics are the way forward.

13. A Match Made in Summit Heaven — The Startup/Investor Scene

In all the craziness and randomness that is The Web Summit, the one thing that does clearly gel is the coming together of startups and investors. ‘The Secret to Success’ included leading investors who shared their learnings with investments on stage — what works and why. In startups they often look at the potential of the individual over the product, saying they seek out that person who is “persistent and willing to fail fast”. They are focussed on founders who are ‘relentless, who are not going to give up, who stick with it, who have good insights into their market and who have already proved themselves’ says Mood Rowghani, Partner KPCB (Uber are one of their companies). But most importantly, founders need to understand failure and how you can correct your course through failure. This can also be a lesson for marketing practices also.

14. Privacy is Dead

Privacy was also a big topic on the agenda and overall it was mutually agreed that privacy is truly dead online. Many equated the Snowden files being the beginning of the realisation for the general consumer. However as consumers become more astutely aware of this, organisations are going to have to look beyond their data and view trends and activities of the customer rather than relying purely on the accuracy of the data.

Despite it’s size The Web Summit has a buzz about it that brings diverse opinions into one place — it is an amazing networking opportunity, and the range of learning from a diverse 20,000 audience is limitless.