media update’s Adam Wakefield was at the summit in Johannesburg on Thursday, 1 March, to hear the industry pause, take its breath, and reflect on what has passed, what is happening, and the looming horizon.

Experience affects the bottom line

The summit, hosted at The Theatre on the Track in Kyalami, Johannesburg, was opened by IAB SA CEO Josephine Buys, who apart from surprising attendees by announcing that she will be stepping down from her position, stressed the need for digital marketing to continually evolve in a disrupted environment.

Wayne Hull, managing director of Accenture Digital in Africa, focused on the power of experience.

“The companies and brands that get this mix right are really going to win in this new battleground around experience,” Hull said.

Customer experience according to Hull is measureable, through a tool Accenture called the 'Love Index'. It consists of five key dimensions: being fun, relevance, engage, social, and helpfulness.

If these dimensions are underpinned by powerful design and applied intelligence, the impact on a business’s bottom line is significant and positive. Hull said companies that are design-driven, compared to those which are not, see a USD $4 return for every USD $1 invested in design.

“Over half the people online today judge a brand and a company by their website and online engagement,” Hull said.

“Almost 50% [of users] will stop engaging with that company or brand if the online experience is unattractive. And, if that online web experience doesn’t transfer seamlessly to the mobile device, the chance of consumers disengaging is very high. This tells you how importance experience is.”

Hull was followed by Elizabeth De Stadler, founding director of Novation Consultancy, who took attendees through the different implications, challenges, and opportunities of the soon-to-be implemented Protection of Personal Information Act, which will impact how direct marketing works.

She told media update in an interview after her presentation that an opportunity existed for companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors through how they handle personal data.

Humans and empathy a business imperative 

Musa Kalenga, CEO of MyNoot and Clock Education, said it was no surprise that people were “freaking the freak out” about the pace of change in the world, with 2.5 quintillion bites of data being produced every single day and increasingly powerful computing power becoming publicly available through smart phones.

“We need to think about this notion of how we do business. We need to speak about this notion about being human and how it is intrinsically good for business,” he said.

Technology and its adoption is increasing at an exponential rate, but humanity is only improving incrementally.

“That is a conundrum. How are we able to send people to the Moon, but we can’t feed people on earth?” Kalenga asked.

“It is a huge challenge. Our fundamental business models have to respond to these challenges.”

Impact investing is such a way, where money is used to change lives before growing revenue. Kalenga noted that the Rothschild banking family and the Saudi royal family were two examples of extremely wealthy groups diverting their money into impact investing.

Related to impact investing is impacting marketing, which has empathy at its core. Empathy, said Kalenga, was different from insight because insight is the commercial application of empathy. Empathy is the ability to step into someone else’s shoes, and feel what they feel. Insight can be outsourced. Empathy cannot.

“If you don’t have empathy at the core of everything you do, if it’s not rooted in empathy, you’ve got a problem,” he said.

Transformation is key, and streaming is changing broadcasting

Transformation is also critical, with Kalenga stating that the most successful organisations are diverse at their core. If business and marketing does not transform, it is going to become increasingly hard to exist.

“Things are going to change and things have to change and change doesn’t have to be forced and it has to be embraced. I hope we move towards this change and act like humans before we think about brands,” he said.

One of the last speakers of the day was Justin Hewelt, global director at UK-based consultancy PayMedia, who spoke about trends in device adoption, especially within the television sector, and new video products such as over-the-top streaming (OTT) services.

Hewelt said the broadcasting TV industry is going through “unprecedented change”, with wide-scale adoption of smartphones, and their decreasing price changing how people consume television content, and how that content is broadcast.

“Netflix’s success is being on every single device and using viewing data to understand what kind of propositions people are interested in,” Hewlet said.

Various content providers are also moving into streaming channels, and subscribers are willing to pay for more than one streaming service to ensure they receive all the content they want to watch.

For more information, www.iabsa.net.  

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Customer experience and technology were two themes that permeated the 2018 IAB Digital Summit, and the retail environment is another sector that will undergo rapid change as a result. Read more in our article, How chatbots and AI are changing the consumer experience.