Dr. Dominik Matyka, Chief Advisor DMEXCO
Never before has attitude been more important than this year, as industries, disrupted by the corona virus struggle between economic and human survival from a home office. Remote working and social contact through digital interfaces has become the new normal. Events in the Corona crisis, such as the #StopHateforProfit initiative involving Facebook, Coca-Cola, Unilever amongst other corporates highlight a need for the digital industry to have a clear attitude. In line with our ‘Attitude Matters‘ motto, we have published a DMEXCO report featuring a comprehensive study on the topic of attitude. An overwhelming majority (89 percent) believe that companies have a responsibility to solve societal challenges and over half (54 percent) believe that there will probably not be a return to business as usual.
At DMEXCO, we have digitized at speed to create the brand new platform DMEXCO @home to take the leading conference, fair and European networking hub for the business of the future fully virtual. After months of lock down and uncertainty, we are looking forward to hosting an intensive exchange with our colleagues, industry experts, our community and new visitors on September 23 and 24 from wherever they are in the world, via desktop or mobile screen.
Like many working teams, we are in a pandemic white space and have had a great deal of interest from our community on how it will work, particularly with the unique networking and social interaction functions. These two functions have been at the core of our development of the digital platform and we want to let our visitors know what to expect. With a design, reminiscent of social media interfaces, there will be several matchmaking possibilities on the platform:
- platform-wide there will be interactive contact suggestions via a free text search in the Communications Center;
- via a ‘Discovery Graph’, a Snap Map style visualization of the community with a filter function so that a visitor can search for contacts according to their business needs;
- with a click on an interactive ‘Brandcard’ located in the ‘Show floor’, a visitor can enter a virtual exhibitor space, manned by a team of contact persons and click on an interactive exhibitor profile (green signals that a team member is online and available);
- a visitor can make group video calls with up to 10 people, communicate via a messenger function or via a schedule-a-meeting feature.
Every visitor can create their own profile, entering their area of interest, company, position etc. We, as humans, need physical social contact but it could be much easier to search for contacts online with a filtered search function, than through a physical anonymous crowd. Europe is at the global forefront of GDPR regulation and each matchmaking possibility on the DMEXCO @home platform will be preempted by an ‘opt in’ function for personal consent to ensure privacy.
In the mobile marketing world, an industry central to DMEXCO @home consumer concerns for privacy have been a barrier to uptake of some new technologies, for example, location based marketing. Aside from Generation Z, comfortable with using apps that track their whereabouts on their mobile phone, most consumers are reluctant to broadcast their location and movements. This attitude, despite de-identification technology, has hindered the development of location based marketing in the mobile marketing sphere. In this strange world of today, consumers now have a strong health incentive to allow bluetooth low energy to be activated on their smartphone and use the Corona warning apps. Again GDPR compliant in Europe, the government promise of anonymity is a key driver to consumer uptake. Will Corona disruption cause long term changes in consumer behavior and drive location based marketing forward?
Nobody can predict precisely how long Corona will disrupt or what the long term impact will be. Today, there has been a huge global shift to relying on digital technology and experimentation. In April, a survey revealed that our DMEXCO Community believes that in the longer term, the pace of digital transformation will accelerate. With these opportunities, come digital corporate responsibility and the right attitude. Foursquare, who will be speaking at DMEXCO @home , have committed the company’s tech with a distributed team of volunteer technologists, to helping in pandemic times and are sharing aggregated and anonymized foot traffic data from across the USA with health authorities. Snap, an important player in mobile social media and speaker at DMEXCO @home, after its research revealed that anxiety was high amongst its users, has rolled out a mini app with partner meditation app Headspace. Who would have predicted that Apple would cooperate with Google? At DMEXCO, we may have this year been relieved of carbon offsetting our business travel with our DMEXCO forest initiative but green pressure is here to stay and will affect all industries. Not every company will have the same attitude but having an attitude on how brands can drive societal innovation and take digital responsibility is business relevant.
With DMEXCO @home we are looking forward to offering the platform for the mobile marketing industry to come together, join the discussion, innovate, have an attitude and push the reset button for collective future solutions. DMEXCO @home is the new way to network, to interact, to exchange. It’s real. Get your Ticket to DMEXCO @home now!
MMA UK Blog 