The global marketing forum, focused on digital, dmexco is less than a month away. What began as a Europe based platform, has now made Cologne host to a global forum, where participation from the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region has been increasing over the years.
In a conversation with the Arabian Marketer, dmexco Co-Founders, Christian Muche and Frank Schneider, take stock of what it means to be a digital economy, and some of the MENA led learnings expected from the platform this year. Excerpts:
Middle East is perceived a strong digital economy in the making. This is a key theme at dmexco – how do you think the event can better assist professionals in the region in their day to day decision making?
dmexco stands for ‘Pure Business’. To demonstrate this, we bring together leading personalities of the digital economy from all over the world – including MENA. After all, we believe in the power of good business relationships, personal encounters, and sharing experiences at the national and international levels. Our mission is to build bridges — between diverse market participants and business models. Through the varied possibilities and formats of dmexco, we generate momentum, provide food for thought, and promote creativity and innovations.
Do you see this make a difference for professionals?
As the leading global business and innovation platform of the digital economy, we have seen that this gathering of various nations, personalities and market participants is inspiring and creates value. This is why we continuously and untiringly travel all over the world, bringing together people and their topics, ideas and businesses. And it’s why we bring together the most important thinkers and companies for two days in Cologne, at the heart of Europe, for the highlight of the dmexco year. In the process, we enable the participants to conclude good and successful business deals on site.
What are some of the steps that you have undertaken to make the forum relevant to MENA?
In the scope of our dmexco Satellite events we visit the global metropolises of the digital business. Our aim: Face-to-face dialogue with our – potential – exhibitors. Additionally, we provide high quality networking with exiting conversations and discussions on the most important topics of the global digital economy. Over the last years, we arranged several Satellite events, i.e. in Singapore, Mumbai, New York City, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Zurich, Stockholm and Tel Aviv. Facing the Expo 2020 in Dubai we are planning already two satellite events for the MENA market. Our goal is to organize a special MENA dmexco pavilion. As the global business and innovation platform, dmexco is open for all players and topics of all regions and offers first-class pure business and networking opportunities.
Brands have to provide experiences more than ever today. How has digital communication channels helped them in achieving on this goal?
Digital communication offers much more and additionally consistently new opportunities to reach the right target group at the right time via the right channel with the right message. Along with voice control, virtual reality, artificial intelligence or gesture control new communication technologies open up. In this context, the individualization of the advertising message for an optimal customer experience is essential. Foundation for this is the analytic potential based on smart data.
What do you consider the strongest trends imperative for a digital economy?
In principle, every enterprise has to be ready for the ongoing process of the digital transformation and accept that this process is already running on high tranches. The will to have a direct entry into the digital transformation is elementary – waiting is losing. The use of Artificial Intelligence will have a great impact. Other key trends now and in the future include the Customer Experience, the purposive use of smart data and a certain start-up mentality that every company should internalize.
