5 things I learned at WebSummit 2017
In November 2017, I had the immense pleasure and privilege to be invited to attend the 2017 WebSummit — AKA the Davos of the tech world — as part of their ‘Women in Tech’ programme. It has been a truly eye-opening, invigorating and inspiring experience — highly recommended to anyone looking to better understand what the future looks like, re-charge, get a sense of perspective , make a career change, and meet interesting like-minded people.
The 4-day summit covers a vast breadth of topics — from product strategy, to sustainable energy, leadership, space exploration and climate change — by means of panels, debates, presentations, pitch battles and Q&As. This year, Paddy Cosgrave’s team has attracted an outstanding roster of speakers of insane calibre — from Al Gore, to CEO of Slack, Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Asana (and co-founder of Facebook) Dustin Moskovitz, writer and comedian David Schneider, CTO of Amazon Werner Vogels, CEO of Farfetch Jose Neves, the titan of tech journalism Kara Swisher, CEO of Reddit Steve Huffman, NASA Astronaut Mike Massimino and even activist Kaytlyn Jenner — who in turn attracted about 60,000 attendees to the event.
I could only imagine the kind of vibrations and creativity this much brain power can produce, when forced to collide, and it genuinely exceeded all of my wildest expectations. In this post, I wanted to share my key takeaways from WebSummit, as I experienced it, as I really hope to inspire more young entrepreneurs, students, and even my parents, to take the pilgrimage to Lisbon in November 2018 to experience what I have experienced first-hand (pss if you’re a woman in tech, contact me for a discount code)
1. FOR SOME INDUSTRIES, THE TIDE IS DOWN — ADVERTISING IS ONE OF THEM
The whole purpose of WebSummit is to unite people from diverse walks of life and encourage difficult conversations that all effectively centre around two fundamental questions: 1) what does the future hold, 2) how can we do X better / faster / cheaper / safer’. Inevitably, this creates winners with a positive future outlook and loosers with bleak prospects. While the tide is clearly up for some — blockchain, AI, AR / VR, social media at large, for others — not so much. On the loser bench of this year we have industries experiencing a lack of genuine innovation: advertising, traditional media outlets, and email.
Since I have the luck of working in one of those unlucky industries, I will zoom in on advertising in particular. In a nutshell, there are six main (interconnected) threats to advertising, and ad agencies in particular:
(1) The Facebook-Google duopoly is democratising and simplifying access to a global audience, attaining 90% of digital ad spend in the process and eliminating the need for agencies altogether. Anyone with access to a computer can become an advertising expert, if they wish to do so.
(2) There is an acknowledged lack of diversity of talent, which results in a shallow idea pool when it comes to creative work;
(3) CMOs are facing increasingly shorter tenures, chasing short-term goals instead of sustainable brand longevity;
(4) Majority of actors in the industry have a limited understanding of how to effectively tackle brand safety and ad blocking;
(5) Low quality digital ads that have flooded the market are driving down CPMs, in turn capping the amount of high quality content publishers are able to afford to create;
(6) Agency-alternatives entering the marketplace from multiple angles: traditional consultancies, alternative ‘data’ agencies (eg. Cambridge Analytica), and start-ups that build technology on top of existing platforms, democratising ad tech further.
What gives me a tonne of reassurance, though, is that our mission and how we go about achieving it at Essence — with our focus on transparency, quality media and in-house ad tech — is already years ahead of the industry, that at large, has been told to ‘adapt or die’ by at least 5 speakers at the conference. And while advertising industry as we know it now may not be around that much longer, it is interesting and challenging to be a part of the transition.
2. THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION IS BRIGHT
On a totally different subject, one of my favourite talks was around the future of learning and education. Aside from technological advances that are evident all around us, the way we educate the next generation of humans needs to fundamentally change in order to equip those young humans for a tech-heavy future. Mmantsetsa Marope (Director of international Bureau of Education at UNESCO) has put this forward most eloquently: educators and learning technology for the generation born after 2005 should focus on the four so-called ‘perennial stabilizer’ skills, and not textbook subjects, namely:
1. Knowing how to learn: the rapid technological change around us will require future generations to continuously adapt and learn new skills
2. Being a self-starter: basically, learning to motivate yourself and not wait for others to do it for you
3. Knowing how to collaborate: team work will be as essential as ever, with robots and AI taking over more and more tasks that requires input from a single human
4. Developing a local / global sensitivity: being adaptable to multiple cultural contexts will be crucial as geographical and cultural boundaries start to blur
I actually think all of the above should be adopted by anyone working in tech, and certainly in marketing, so stay ahead of the curve.
3. DEALING WITH A POST-TRUMP REALITY HAS AN UPSIDE
The elephant in the room (not invited, of course) was Donald Trump. The vast and horrifying consequences of the 2016 election and his presidency were tackled by multiple panellists from various angles — below are my favourite, and most optimistic, takeaways:
1. Despite Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change, the US, and in particular the states of California and New York, are on track to meet and exceed their emission targets. Al Gore gave a very powerful speech on the role of tech in climate change, closing the Summit on the final day, and the message is clear: Trump’s actions on climate change will not hamper progress, ‘the train has left the station’. Reassuring news indeed — goes to show that one nation’s or even person’s voice, however powerful, is not enough to stop the groundswell.
2. Quality media outlets in the US and Europe are seeing a sharp rise in their subscriber bases: the public’s appreciation for high quality reporting and fear of fake news is re-shaping the industry, liberating it from the dependency on advertisers (see above why it’s not great) and driving the subscription monetization model forward.
3. The ethics behind the use of data to propel Trump’s digital media campaign have been widely debated, and raised many moral responsibility questions that go beyond the political sphere. The question I found fascinating is this: can there ever be a fair and transparent exchange of consumer data in return for a service? We use various data sources for our client’s campaigns all the time — so something to ponder.
4. CHANGING WORKPLACE
It’s worth mentioning that while Millennials have long been the focus of marketers, the biggest shift is now happening in the work place. The future or work is being re-shaped around a new workforce, with companies like Asana (my personal favourite), Slack, Intercom and Facebook capturing the shift. The standards, practices and tools used in the work place are defined by the expectations of the workforce — organisations need to be open, connected, honest, mobile 1st and personalised to retain and attract Millennial talent. Internal and inter-company collaboration is a subject very close to my heart and a root cause of many of my day-to-day challenges in my role as an Account Director. I consider myself lucky to work for a company that has used Google Suite and Atlassian for internal comms and task management from day 1, with me personally adding a mixture of Asana/ Trello . Still, we don’t work in a bubble, and trying to collaborate with companies that run on 100% Microsoft is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: it is painful, annoying and simply does not work. The complicity of those CTOs / CIOs in those instances baffles me, as time and productivity savings that come from better, more inclusive, integrated tools are considerable.
5. PURPOSE MATTERS
Finally, every single talk I attended was punctuated by an acute awareness that as the mass generational change is sweeping the workplace and our society at large, Millennial values are coming to front of mind of business leaders, marketers, politicians and scientists. The notion of purposeful work, purposeful consumption and a purposeful life in general Is widely acknowledged as a massive driver and influence on a whole multitude of areas:
- businesses need to change the way they attract and retain Millennial talent
- learning is being re-defined from ‘subjects taught out of compulsion’, to ‘skills taught for a purpose’
- brands that are able to genuinely understand, communicate and harness their purpose are the ones that are growing the fastest and will achieve longevity with the millennial consumer
I will leave you with one funny quote to end my rambling. In the closing remarks of the final marketing panel, Jason Harris, the CEO of Mekanism has put forward his best guess on who can be considered the first-ever CMO: Jesus. Indeed, he was quite a success, selling a belief system with no physical product to — now — over a billion people. And one last thing: I’ve already pre-registered for 2018.
