Digital Events | by Danny Meadows-Klue, cofounder and chief executive, IAB Europe
Marketing in Italy is changing, and it is changing almost overnight. Today’s IAB Forum is a perfect example of how the web has moved from edge of Italian marketing to its centre. Two years ago the Forum was a half day event for a few hundred people, last year almost 2000 people joined the convention centre, queuing outside from 7am and not finishing the last espresso on until after dark. This year more than 3000 people pre-registered for two days of convention that now has a small trade show attached; at this rate, by 2010 the IAB will be in talks with AC Milan about the only venue left in the city that’s large enough.
The story of the IAB Italy Forum is the story of Italy’s internet marketing industry and the incredible speed of change, yet as more firms harness the power of the web that pace is accelerating rather than slowing. Today’s event has been packed with the latest ideas: Web 2.0, blogging, video advertising, integration, IPTV, the unstoppable growth of search engine advertising. Italian marketers have much to be proud of.
Last year when IAB President Layla Pavone and the board of IAB Italy invited me to share my ideas, the examination question they set was ‘what is the future of internet marketing?’ I believed Italy would soon reach a tipping point - that moment at which a market suddenly explodes and goes mainstream. Looking back, it’s now clear that the 2005 Forum was itself the spark for that explosive growth; it gave confidence to marketing managers and touched thousands of people with practical messages of how to use the internet effectively and wisely.
Talking with a few of the firms here, I can sense the passions and convictions members of the marketing community have: banks that now get their customers through search, clothing manufacturers who build their brands online, newspaper groups that have become multi-media entertainment firms, entrepreneurs who quit high paid jobs for start-up land and agencies that are guiding the new advertising budgets.
I’m honoured to be invited back to celebrate this, and today in my talk what I hoped to do was enforce that all the myriad digital techniques– search, blogging, email, web TV – are not isolated silos, but are the joined up framework of a new communication landscape, and one now shared across most countries.
Yes, Italy has crossed its tipping point, but it is still just starting the real transition. In the UK, where 10% of advertising and shopping now takes place online, there is a clear model of where Italy will be in a few years time. And even the UK and the USA are still only in the early stages of their own transitions. Trust me: the growth in the next five years will dwarf everything we have seen in the previous ten.
As the co-founder and chief executive of IAB Europe, I’ve been lucky enough to work with internet teams in more than 20 countries this year on the development of their markets and their firms. The opportunities here in Italy are as rich as anywhere in Europe, but what happens next is a choice. The market will move; but each individual and each firm still faces a choice. Since 2000 I’ve been talking about the digital networked society and the new economic rules that emerge from it. I hope that today I made the path clear to everyone, but it’s equally clear to me that not everyone will walk the path.
Ten years ago I saw the internet as a parallel communications channel, one that would blend into media landscape and take probably 20% of our media time and about the same in advertising. I was wrong. The net will subsume most media networks, from daily newspapers to outdoor media. It will become the core customer communications channel along which conversations of data will flow that automate the management of our jobs and lives; and with an ease and efficiency that few can comprehend. We’re transiting into a period of massive economic restructure, the first glimpses of which we are seeing in the media sector – the first industry to reach out online back in the early nineties.
Suddenly everything to play for. Marketers and digital strategists hold in their hands the very futures of their firms. Some are ready to walk the path; some are not. The message from today’s talk was to begin that journey. For marketers to brave in changing their marketing, to follow their audiences into these new spaces. Inside their businesses they must lead their teams and be given the freedom to do this. They must help their firms discover how to harness these new tools and find their directions and values. It is time to be champions of the digital future because that future is here and now. Suddenly, everything is to play for.
· Email Danny Meadows-Klue: Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com
· You can watch his talk www.IAB.it
· You can find out more about IAB Europe at www.IABeurope.ws
