Following my visit to Dmexco, the largest digital marketing conference in Europe, I would like today to share with you some thoughts that came to me after my stay in Cologne, and which are also following my recent article “The age of digital maturity for every company?”. Dmexco is definitely a very international exposition, where we can find all the actors of the online marketing market: agencies, advertisers, software vendors (such as Adobe Systtems), start-ups, all coming from all over Europe, but also US and Japan.
For me, it is the perfect place to exchange views with our partners (integrators and agencies), our customers, our prospects, but also to have your finger on the pulse of digital marketing in general. So here is an express summary regarding what I thought of these two days of conference, with 4 points standing out in particular:
The real issue of digital is a business one
2 or 3 years ago, when we use to meet advertisers at a trade show, we use to mostly meet people belonging to the IT department. Today, we meet many marketers but also executives, who have a real decision power on specific technological choices. There has been a real realisation that decisions around the digital are first and foremost business choices, which engage a company and cannot be limited to purely technological choices. This development is also linked to the fact that leaders must be digital evangelizers. In the words of Thierry Benhaim, CEO of La Grande Recre, when he discussed the digitalisation of its business at an EBG conference, the digital is, more than anything, “a power issue.”
The digital has become the number one channel to interact with consumers
Today, advertisers have realized that digital could no longer be treated as a channel “apart”, but was, on the contrary, the first channel with which they can engage with their customers. And this, whether the final sale is made online or not.
The customer experience is at the heart of all current digital issues
What also strike me during these two days at dmexco is that the customer experience is part of all discussions. All businesses, regardless of their size, are aware of the importance of the customer experience, and the need to put the final consumer at the heart of their approach. The goal for all advertisers today is to provide the best possible customer experience. A unified experience across all channels, a flexible experience (a “seamless” one, like our American friends would say) which doesn’t use digital as a separate channel, but as a moment similar to another in all interactions of a brand with its audience.
Integrated solutions are gaining ground on “point solutions”
Finally, one generally encounters two major types of players in this type of event: publishers offering “point solution”, which give a solution to a specific problem, or companies such as Adobe, offering a range of integrated and unified solutions. At the moment, more and more advertisers opt for the second option, and the integration of solutions has become a real challenge in terms of productivity and creation value. In fact, companies do not want to see their team manage dozens of different providers, and prefer to free up some of their time so they can focus on tasks with real added value.
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