Last week saw the eleventh Digital Marketing Expo & Conference (DMEXCO) take place in Cologne, Germany. Over 40,000 attendees from the media, marketing and tech world, visited the halls within Koelnmesse to hear from world-renowned speakers and visit the exhibition halls. Speakers and exhibitors included established global players such as Google, Verizon and Unruly, as well as start-ups looking to break into the industry with their new & innovative technologies.
Key themes from the conference focused on data, blockchain, AI, trust & transparency and diversity & inclusion within the tech world and the broader industry at large. Scroll down to read more about #OMDDMEXCO 2019.
What we learnt at DMEXCO
Change of the human mindset in media
People remain the best assets to building, innovating and deploying ad tech solutions. That being said, we need to ensure that the correct human craft is being applied, especially in an environment where media is changing but the technology isn’t. 4C insights have developed their platform to seamlessly integrate Digital and TV in an era of video eruption on social media. Technology has long been able to solve this problem, but humans remain the biggest barrier to change and default to running two separate channels in parallel.
Creative Experience
Media owners and publishers at DMEXCO, reinforced their ambition to extract more creative value for advertisers. Publishers like Teads believe in their platforms and are not necessarily looking for a tech innovation to enhance their offering. Instead, Teads are focused on providing creative collaborations with clients, to help users achieve a better brand experience within the creative units. OMD EMEA is able to support our clients with unlocking more creative support, by leveraging our holding group’s negotiating position to extract maximum value.
New contextual obsession
In a time where data-driven audience targeting is seen as the best route to bringing the art and science together and achieving optimal media efficiency; a legacy approach has withstood the test of time. Contextual targeting has continuously been a crucial way to align specific user interests, with a client relevant brand proposition. However, scaling audience segments has also been a continuous challenge. DMEXCO highlighted some of the key opportunities that have emerged, mainly as a result of restricted 3rd party audiences and limited gateways to accessing 2nd party publisher data. As these audience segment shrink, contextual targeting has grown especially in the area of channel creators on YouTube and the wider adoption of video content.
Fearlessly protect your product
Twitch CRO, Walker Jacobs, was interviewed by Omnicom’s very own Innovation expert Chris Denson, who extracted a very memorable sound bite. When pressed on why Twitch takes so much pride in being a streamer first platform, Walker made the point of the most successful platforms, in terms of gaining consumer time, have stayed loyal to their principles. Netflix and Fortnite are current champions for consumer time but none of these platforms have adopted ads. Twitch has successfully integrated advertising by sticking to their streamer first principles and remain a model to imitate, as these platforms advance their commercial decisions.
DMEXCO in numbers
