As I was sitting on the plane ride back to Munich from the Hague, I started trying to remember all of the great tips, crazy statistics, and key information that had been thrown at me the last two hectic days at the popular iStrategy conference. Good thing I took notes…
One of the biggest highlights for me was our CEO, Kai Boyd, giving his presentation on boosting conversion rates. He spoke to our main product, Pay by Shopping, how it works, and practical applications in the real world. He mainly focused on its application in Facebook games but also mentioned how it can be used in other browser games. He ended the session with a cutthroat round of jeopardy answers and questions such as these:
The answer: This number reached one billion in 2012. The question: What is the number of Facebook users?
The answer: This is the number one reason for shopping cart abandonment. The question: What are shipping costs?
There was a common theme at iStrategy of shifting our focus in marketing over to people. People are the future of marketing! iStrategy started out with a bang when Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy, dug deep into this theme by addressing the fact that the future of marketing is not technology but really analyzing human behavior. A great example of this is addressing the human fear of uncertainty and how that affects waiting in line. Many people get anxious waiting in a line if it isn’t moving. Disney easily addressed this by adding progress signs saying ‘from here the wait is 30 minutes.’ Problem solved.
Another great speech going with this theme was from Eric Edge, the Head of Marketing and Communications for Facebook in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He gave his perceptions on how to present your brand to really reach people on Facebook. Just throwing an ad on Facebook is not enough. His tips included being true to your brand, being useful, being relevant, creating a connection, and being entertaining. A great example of this was the famous Oreo ad during the Superbowl. (You can still dunk in the dark.) It was relevant, creative, true to the Oreo brand, and timely.
The closing keynote speech, and my personal favorite, was from Cindy Gallup, the vivacious founder of IfWeRanTheWorld and Make Love Not Porn (It’s an incredibly interesting project that is worth looking into.) She said that the future of marketing cannot be completely data driven and instead should be data informed. Her two main takeaways to improve your work life were to 1. Identify what you love (it’s probably what you do the best anyways) and 2. Identify the conditions under which you love doing it.
iStrategy was full of many other great speakers from the sarcastically brilliant host Adam Burns to the captivating Marc Mathieu, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Unilever and many more (Really too many awesome speakers to list!) Additional highlights for me were twitter man with his megaphone shouting out tweets, the iPad mini giveaway from Acquia (which I unfortunately didn’t win), Kai’s brainstorming team winning the Star Gazer Award, the great viral video presentation from eBuzzing Social (Remember: Content is King, Distribution is Queen), and of course, the iScars (which I also didn’t win. Insert sad face here.)
Oh yeah… GOLDI came too.
Overall, I found iStrategy to be an eye opening experience and I was so happy that I could take part. I’d love to hear feedback from other attendees from not only The Hague but also from other iStrategy conferences as well. What did you guys think the key takeaways were? Who was your favorite presenter? And what were the top highlights for you?
(This was written by Courtney Bellmann, a Marketing Manager at deal united GmbH)