Want to Make Digital — Be Digital: The Core Message of DMEXCO 2018
On September 12–13, Cologne, Germany hosted the annual DMEXCO conference. DMEXCO is the meeting place and a community for key players in digital business, marketing, and innovation. The conference builds an ecosystem with seminars, debates, and expositions outlining the future of the digital economy and driving market value. They bring together 40,000 visitors, 1,100 exhibitors, and 500 speakers from around the world each year.
This year Nanosematics Lab on behalf of the project SOVA.AI, took part in the DMEXCO exhibition. CEO Stanislav Ashmanov and Sales Director Denis Kleptsov represented the company and its products, namely our chatbots capabilities in business.
Here we would like to outline our key observation and discuss the main takeaways from the event:
1. Digital-market indeed replicates a market structure, where the companies strive to develop a narrow and deep strategy by suggesting targeted expert solutions. Quite often such a platform is seen as a compelling client use window. Although not many market players reveal their algorithms’ secrets, data compatibility methods, and technical components.
2. In the recent five years, customization has become ingrained in the marketing specialist lexicon. Today customization at the very least means understanding of the customer’s needs and providing them with what they want when they want as a part of the product offering. While the maximum task is identifying the specific customer experience and navigating it from the category entry point to the new purchasing cycle.
Today we can gather and process data for the next step of the customization process. The first largest issue here is how difficult it is to merge this data. Second, it is challenging to begin the proper customization that can lead to the highest possible business outcomes. The best solution is to practice testing and learning.
3. Although DATA is even more of a marketing buzzword than customization, there still remain issues and misunderstandings around it. It is important to finally commit to memory the difference between CDP (Continuous Data Protection), DMP (Data Management Platform), and CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
At the same time a few abbreviations underwent the added transformations: FMCG (Fast-moving Consumer Goods) is now referred to as CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods), LTV (Life-time Value) as CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), and DMC (Digital Media Controller) as CDP (Customer Data Platform).
4. A lot of discussion focused on the underappreciated value and the growing importance of the one-to-one contacts. This means that not only are CRM, mobile texts, virtual assistants, and chatbots staying alive, but also that they will soon take up a significant segment of the digital budget splits.
5. Efficiency in marketing is a cornerstone that has been approached differently during different times. If in the past the advertising campaign success was measured by ROI (Return On Investment), today incrementality becomes the key KPI (Key Performance Indicator). Clients will soon pay the agencies not just for reaching the specific performance figures, but for exceeding the expectations and beating the set goals and quotas.
6. Of course, we can’t talk about marketing without discussing VR (Virtual reality) and AR (Augmented reality). Following the proverbial user experience mantra, soon it will be impossible to get the customer excited without employing augmented reality, as long as introducing the technology is appropriate and appreciated. There is no need to use VR for the sake of using VR, just like it is silly to introduce hashtags simply to use a hashtag.
We would like to summarize our experience of participating in DMEXCO-2018 with the following idea:
“Before launching anything digital be that in business or in marketing, ask yourself why you need to do it: formulate the specific problem that you would like to solve and only then begin to take action”.
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