The Web Summit not only lit up the RDS but the city was buzzing over the past two days. We in Starcom had a busy time with all the presentations, networking at the Spotify afterparty and chilling with visitors from all over the world in Everleigh Gardens.

The 4 lucky attendees recount their main memories:

Cara McAuley – The energy and excitement in the RDS was amazing! As well as the various talks it was great to network and meet so many enthusiastic start-ups and share their stories. One which caught my eye was Recredible – a topic map based, experience learning platform. I definitely think it’s a one to watch as it capitalises on the use of maps as an intuitive and semantic tool for knowledge.

Real time advertising will become more dominant with the new buzzword or ‘programmatic targeting’ being mentioned across a few presentations. An unmissable presentation was ‘Real-time Advertising’ on the Digital Marketing stage late yesterday. Given by the CEO of Taykey – Amit Amir – the presentation was essentially selling the wares of this dynamic targeting platform which allows targeting based on trending content. Now – I did have some initial questions:

How accountable is coverage? Surely there’s issues with frequency capping? And really can we actually base audience targeting on trends? However this is a positive development in dynamic real time advertising and definitely something we will be looking into in Starcom…. (watch this space!)

Sinead Conway – The irrepressive Cindy Gallop had good words to say. ‘The business model of the future is shared value + shared action = shared profit’. A strong advocate of women in business she spoke about woman driving change in business. However it was disappointing that out of 300 speakers only 10% were woman, something that was said constantly in the run up to the Summit (and embarrassingly pointed out by THAT banner ad in 2012). I would definitely love to see more women leaders invited to present next year and we’re sure there is no shortage of Cindy Gallops to balance out.

13 year old Jordan Casey spoke on the digital marketing stage yesterday and I have to say I felt like a complete under achiever! This young kid was amazing. He run’s two start ups (Casey Games and launched his second start up TeachWare at the summit yesterday). He received great applause from the audience and he will have a very successful career – we tried to recruit him ourselves but couldn’t get close enough.

Mark Suster from Upfront Ventures gave his recommendations to wannabe entrepreneurs. Describing the volume of those he meets with as ‘Wantrapreneurs’ – only 1 in 100 will actually take the leap to become an entrepreneur. Start early, get planning, and surround yourself with various types of people to drive forward.

Manuel Yoacham – Bitesize content was the winner of this year’s Web Summit – with 15 minutes allocated a presentation. I was dizzy running between the Cloud stage to the Main stage and back to the Digital Marketing stage trying to catch all that I wanted to see. At 15 minutes a slot – is it enough to get what you wanted out of each presentation? No, but it was enough to allow me to take in as much information as possible from this rich summit… only just wish that there had been more time with Gary Vaynerchuk.

Sally Ann King – Brands need to start analysing data on their consumers – People are spending a lot of time on sites and offering up a lot of information to websites, brands have to manage this data & start today to make the most real-time personalisation.This came from many of the speakers but was noted most keenly by Cindy Gallop who coined a great quote;“You are what you Measure”.

Oliver Lumes of Diageo’s advice was clear: “Brands need to keep briefs media neutral and keep objectives clear” & “Be risky and prepare to fail”

Being future focused is always top of the agenda in Starcom and I couldn’t help but be blown away by how future focused so much of the discussions were. Some really key areas that might be alien to some at the moment but definitely won’t be shortly are:

• Programmatic buying
• Native Advertising
• Voice Recognition will move on to not just replace text but to understand emotion and react correspondingly

Never one to ignore a great stat, here are my favourites from the two days:

• 56% of people now pick up a smart mobile device rather than changing the channel – Casper Schlickum Xaxis
• People pick up/check their phone over 120 times a day!! Millennial Media
• Facebook Global have made a huge shift, 40% of their advertising revenue comes from Mobile- however 68% traffic comes from Mobile – this is a sign of where consumers are speeding their time – Brands need to follow.

My parting gift to all still reading, keep It Simple Stupid: See TED Talk on why you should not give a consumer too many choices—Clarity of message earns cut through:

Report from TEDGlobal Session 4: Irrational Choices

Other than our 4 stars, who was at the event…? Well check out the hashtag #esbvinecafe and you will have a good idea!!!

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