The Virtual World of DMEXCO

Written by Izzy McLean-Thorne on 24/09/2020

It’s been a whirlwind two days on the virtual DMEXCO platform. So how did it fair?

When you enter the platform, your networking opportunities are instantly evident on your right hand side bar, showing who is also currently online. This is followed by the Requests and Contacts tabs. On the main feed, we find the Programme which is inundated with studio talks and workshops which you can easily bookmark. In the menu bar, there is also the Virtual Café and Showfloor.

The noticeable downside of this virtual event, however, is that you can only watch it from your desktop. This glues you to one place meaning you can’t watch the wide range of talks on the go.

We started the morning off by attending a talk on ‘the new normal’ in the travel industry, which surrounded the idea that flexibility is key and offline retailers are moving too slowly amid the Covid crisis, leading to their own decline. TUI’s Group Chief Marketing Officer Erik Friemuth explained that trust is the currency and market research shows that people still want to go on holiday, although TUI announced the same day they will be cutting 8,000 jobs after it reported an 83% slump in summer holiday bookings this year.

As Stripe’s COO, Claire Hughes Johnson pointed out in her talk, in the last 25 years the online economy has grown by 1500 times. Our online economy is soon going to transform from an Attention Economy to a Value Economy, as covid has meant thousands of companies have gone online. The missing piece is infrastructure, Cloud, Storage and Compute need to be further invested in for progress.

We moved onto the world of ecommerce, a panel talk driven by consumer data insights and how all industries from fashion to alcohol have benefited amidst the covid crisis. So, what’s the key with thriving ecommerce? It’s not just about customer service anymore, it’s about the whole process from discovery to delivery. If all of this is seamless, the business will benefit. Although, Bożena Nawara-Borek, Ecommerce Manager of Swarovski, still believes ecommerce is not ready to close the gap between retail stores.

What did we learn?

As predicted, Covid was a constant undercurrent topic and it seems that unless businesses are able to embrace and adapt, they will unfortunately go under. Ecommerce is on the up, while travel is on the down and we need to develop better infrastructure to really push the online world.

With our afternoon coffee in hand, we listened to an insightful talk about the progress in Diversity and Inclusion from Maxine Williams, Chief Diversity Officer at Facebook. Although there are still hurdles, it’s promising to hear that their belief is while serving a diverse audience; they need a diverse population that can build products to add value to their customers. It was highlighted that the word ‘incompetency’ seems to be frequent when talking about diversity and this needs to be overcome. Diversity and inclusion does not mean hiring incompetent candidates, it means making sure everyone is evaluated fairly and everyone’s voices are heard.

Here at Osmii, we believe that a diverse team benefits businesses, hence why all our shortlists sent to clients include at least one woman for every man and we stick by our 50/50 slate. This gives a fair balance to what is still an uneven footing in the tech industry.

In summary, we got to listen to incredible speakers who have key insights into our changing world. Maybe what’s missing, as Louisa Wong CEO of Wavemaker pointed out, is the chin wag at the bar afterwards.

Fancy a chin wag over one of our roles? Want to read more about our Diversity & Inclusion values? You can find it all here – www.osmii.com

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