My First Web Summit

This week I traveled to Lisbon, Portugal to attend the Web Summit technology conference.

My goal was to learn new best practices, observe industry trends, and to pit Spoke’s work against some of the best agencies in the industry.

One of the attractive things about Web Summit is that I was also interested in learning about the tech market in the Europe more broadly. I’d love to see Spoke expand with a European office in the future and this conference was a great way to start having that introductory conversation with new stakeholders.

Web Summit as a whole is comprised of multiple disciplines and industry area speakers under the umbrella category of tech — FinTech, Design, Data, Engineering and more. I spent the majority of my time on the “PandaConf” series which is focused on marketing and the larger agency environment. I’m not sure why it was called that but the number of Panda Fiats was striking, so there’s that.

I’m still digesting a lot of my conference notes but here are some of my initial takeaways on the close of the final night of the conference:

• People love video. It is an unparalleled form of content in terms of advertisement conversions. There is no close comparison.
• Google and Facebook consume a tremendous lion’s share of global digital ad spend. A few speakers reference data saying this trend is as high as 3/4 of every single dollar spent goes to these two ad platforms.
• Facebook Live is the real deal. It seems like major brands were waiting on a viable option to leverage the growth of real-time video for interactions with their customers. Periscope and the like were limited to the users already on the platform. Now brands can leverage Live to market to FB’s 1.8B users and boost their real-time videos using FB’s established ad platform.
• The question of whether technology is good for democracy is something Europe is struggling with at its core right now. How technology influences issues of immigration, xenophobia, privacy, and most-recently the Trump election results were topics of conversation among every panel and presentation during the week.
• Digital is increasingly a core component of the traditional agency offering. Where agencies previously offered web and social as ad hoc services or not at all, they are now increasingly relying on digital platforms in their efforts to meet consumers where they are.

Note: these are large industry observations that I’ve amalgamated from the list of talks that I attended and these are not associated with any single speaker.

Outside of these larger industry observations, I plan to do more focused writing in the in the next few days that will discuss specific speaker topics. Talks from CEO’s and Founders including Des Traynor (Intercom), Sean Rad (Tinder), and Maurice Levy (Publicis Groupe) were incredibly inspiring and I want to think through their ideas a bit more before sharing in full.

As I’m writing this the conference is coming to a close with final Night Summit activities in downtown Lisbon. It’s a truly beautiful city and I am excited to return for future conferences.

I’d love to hear what you think. Send me a note on Twitter.