Dublin Web Summit - Best Of Day 1

By Alan Coleman on 19 Oct 2012

We’re fresh from the Web Summit and feeling quite sad about it all. Not only has a great 2 days of speakers, networking, and enormous robots come to an end but there’s also a massive pile of work awaiting us too. We thought we’d share with you some of the fantastic speakers that we had the pleasure of listening to over the 2 days and share their wisdom. Here are 5 of our favourite talks from Day 1. We hope you enjoy! Andrzej Moyseowicz @On_Jay Andrzej has a vast background in the area of branding and innovation and it shows through his highly informative and passionate talks. Andrzej is a avid runner and currently plies his trade as the Strategy & Innovation Director at Saatchi & Saatchi. He presented a mix of witty anecdotes and informative tips. The 3 key takeaways from his speech included:

Your product has to have a purpose if you want it to reach your audience.
For your product to be successful, it must be portable/potent/personal or have an inovation in one of those areas. Using the example of mobile phone innovation right now, he demonstrated this point with the on-going battle between Apple and Samsung.
The final tip that he highlighted was to ensure that your product is reaching the masses. He delivered the example of Nike right now. Nike is transforming their synonymous message of “Just Do It” to fit the wider masses of the market. It is no longer associated with the “elitism” of top athletes. It is now everyone.

Stephen O’Leary @StephenOLeary Stephen brings to the summit a wealth of experience in the area of analytics with focuses on online and offline monitoring and analysis. Although this was not a highly insightful presentation, it was a very entertaining one which really captured the audience in the room. Stephen set out to demonstrate just what you can accomplish through analytics, particularly things that you may not have expected. O’Leary Analytics ran an experiment over Twitter where they analysed 10 phrases over 12 months such as “would someone please invent…”. The results were weird and wonderful from sensors to detect tissue in washing machines to smoke scented candles to applications which can control taxi driver radios! The deep lying point that Stephen was emphasising was the power of analytics to give your company market insights which would not be possible through speaking to them. I think we all can relate to these pleas in some manner. What would you like to see invented? Niall Harbison @NiallHarbison We look forward to any opportunity to hear Niall speak as he has become synonymous with the digital explosion over the last few years. His insights into the industry are highly relevant and entertaining to hear and at the web summit, we feel that he didn’t disappoint. Niall’s frank presentation highlighting the opportunity in the mobile sector right now summarised a very common theme that was prevalent over the 2 days. Mobile is the next big thing and you need to be aware of this. He delivered the statistics that prove this trend.

By the end of 2012, mobile devices will account for 33% of searches performed on Google.
Mark Zuckerberg classifies Facebook as a “mobile” company, “Now we really are a mobile company. All the code we write is mobile”.
There are 10,000 iPhones sold in Ireland every week.

Niall highlighted the power that mobile has to disrupt whole industries giving examples from small startups like Hailo in the taxi industry to Facebook who are "completely betting on mobile". His belief is that mobile will soon innovate the payment industry and rid all our pockets of wallets with numerous cards. Jon Myers @MarinSoftware Myers is the Commercial Director of Marin Software, a global online advertising platform. Much like the predecessors on the stage over the morning, Jon continued the trend of talks emphasising the importance of mobile with a particular emphasis on online advertising. According to Myers, there has been a 181% increase in mobile search traffic in 2012 compared to 2011. The most important add-on to the above statistic is the continued success of paid advertising on mobile devices. Paid ads on mobile and tablet devices enjoy clickthrough-rates of 4.69%. Alan Coleman @WolfgangDigital I know, we’re a little biased aren’t we? We’re very proud of Alan here in the office and believe he delivered a fantastic, insightful address of the 3 biggest innovations of online advertising right now. In the bronze position, Alan spoke of retargeting but more specifically the introduction of search retargeting. Unlike retargeting, search retargeting allows marketers to directly advertise to consumers who have never visited your website but have visited a site of one of your competitors. As Alan puts it, imagine walking down Grafton Street with a sign advertising your company as consumers walk out of a competitor’s store and you will understand the power of search retargeting. Alan attributed the silver medal to new innovations in analytics, particularly attribution. Multi-touch attribution allows you to not only see the final action which enabled conversion but now the different touch points before conversion. This enables companies to now view the bigger picture and analyse the average time to conversion. And just in case you don’t quite understand it, we recommend a look at Jason McAteer’s goal against the Netherlands in 2002. Finally the gold medal was awarded to the innovations in the line of interest based marketing. Google recently introduced the Ad Preferences Manager. What this handy little tool provides marketers are interest segmented consumers. Unbeknownst to most users, Google is compiling your profile with the different interests that you’ve searched in the past. This gives highly targeted consumers. Equally all users can edit their ad preferences to sign up for ads from any area (e.g. cars, houses, etc.). That concludes our Day 1 roundup. If you want to see or read more about the speakers or others that you may have missed, we highly recommend visiting the Dublin Web Summit website for more information. Let us know who your favourite speakers of the day were! Paul