FT Digital Media Conference, London 7-8 March 2012
Overall, I would say it was a great event. Lots of good discussion, some news, some debate and of course, a great networking opportunity.
The opening session was kicked of by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. He had some interesting insights regarding his philosophy for Wikipedia and his direction. Key take away for me was regarding the work he and his team are doing to make editing Wikipedia easier. The fact that it is not easy was sighted as a contributing factor towards the fact that 87% of those editing Wikipedia are male and their average age is 26.
During the future of digital journalism panel discussion, John Ridding (CEO of the FT), noted that they had seen a 70% growth in tablet readers and 60% in Smartphone readers. Evgeny Lebedev (Chairman of the Evening Standard and Independent) also noted that the launch of Independent Voices website, which was part of his digital strategy. HTML5 was raised more than once as being a key component of future solutions.
Eric Walhfourss of Sound Cloud noted that his service was now being used by 30 M people and they were hitting around 2 M users per month. Their mission was stated as being to “un-mute, the web”.
Pinterest was given some airtime during various discussions. An interest statistic provided was that around 87% of their users are in fact women.
Ann Lewnes (SVP of Global Marketing at Adobe) noted how the world of marketing had changed due to the rise of social media and the increase in data coming back from consumers. She noted that marketing was now much more about data analytics. In fact, she saw a great and growing demand for people with the relevant skill sets today.
During the session titled, “delivering value in a multiplatform world, Andrew Griffith (CFO at BSkyB) provided some interesting statistics. He noted that in the UK, 45% of homes had never paid for TV. He also noted that Zeebox had around 400,000 downloads in a matter of a few months. James Bilefield (President, Conde Nast) noted that the iPad had been a transformational product. He also mentioned that 7% of all GQ circulation is now on iPad.
David Abraham (CEO at Channel 4) gave some of his own perspectives during his presentation. He also took the opportunity to mention the launch of their new 4-7 service, which will be a line of shows from the last seven days that had caused the most “buzz”. He was also quick to note that they would not be using any algorithmic basis for the selection of the shows. The panel discussion following David Abraham’s presentation, reinventing the TV experience, included amongst others, Patrick Barwise from the London School of Economics. Made a very strong point that the industry should not assume that just because technologies are rapidly converging, it does not mean that behavioural changes are following the same path. On-line viewing after all is still in single digits in the UK, whereas TV viewing has actually increased. Part of the reason was attributed to better TV sets and also economic factors causing people to stay at home. Andrew Fisher (CEO at Shazam) noted how successful the Shazam model had been and illustrated the fact by sighting that the Gap had enjoyed a 27% click through rate during the recent Super Bowl, due to Shazam.
During the session called the art of selling in a digital age, Olivier Ropars (Di of Mobile Commerce at eBay) noted the launch of their Red Laser product. This uses object recognition technology to recognise an item in a shop and then allow the user to go and buy it from that shop or any other. He did however note that their own experience was that shoppers usually went on to purchase from the shop where they had first seen the item. Sarah Watson (Group Mobile Manager, NET-A-PORTER) noted that they now had 4m visitors on line per month, 15% of whom were on mobile platforms. The Carl Lagerfeld app had brought particular success as part of a wider marketing campaign.
