Ad:tech 2013: "Brands need to understand the influencers that matter"

Ad:tech 2013 started with thousands of delegates from India and across the world attending in order to get a glimpse of global trends. In the opening keynote in the morning by Wendy Clark, senior vice president - Integrated Marketing Communications and Capabilities, Coca Cola, deliberated on the concept of Liquid and Linked Marketing. Clark stressed on the need to create more stories that are share-worthy instead of typical advertisements. She focused on proper management of the present and the invention of the future.

Clark during her session delved into Coca Cola’s strategy of listening and engagement hubs around the world, which also provide them new measurement tools. Focusing on the three areas of stories, spread and value, she cited the example of the ‘Hug Machine’ set up by Coca Cola in National University of Singapore, which would offer a free can of Coke if one hugged the machine. Even though the campaign ran only in Singapore, it became viral globally and generated over 10 million views in the US.

CLark also shared eight key learning’s for today’s digital marketers. She said, “ Be share-worthy by creating content that is interesting and compelling; embrace the new sales force; listen and then engage; test, fail, learn, and then scale; disrupt yourself or be disrupted by the market; do not accept the status quo; and play well on a behavioural level to manage increasingly complicated campaigns.”

The second keynote presentation by Katharyn White, vice president - Marketing, IBM Global Business Services emphasised on the three imperatives for marketing professionals including understanding the customer as an individual, creating a system of engagement that maximises value creation at every touch and designing your culture and brand so that they are authentically one.
She stated, “The world is changing. Are we prepared," she questioned.

White further added, “We need to understand consumer as individual and we have the technology to that but we need to apply analysis to this body of data. We need to create a system of engagement which is always more personalised." 

The third keynote speaker was Ruth Stubbs, iProspect and digital media, Asia Pacific who spoke on reinventing the way brands are built. She focused on the reinventionvices  of brand building. According to her we live in a world where everything is converging. Digital technology is creating more media , more devices , on which to consume that media and greater interconnection between those devices, bringing convergence between technology, consumer and content with more and more business being done online. Stubbs noted, "Brands need to understand the influencers that matter. The idea needs to be brand worthy; it should state what our company stands for”.