remix09 – live event notes 1

10:55 at the Museum for Hamburgische Geschichte, and the show will start any minute.

The speakers of the first panel are already sitting on stage. First topic: 

Share Economy, Collaborative Marketing, Radical Individualism 
Markenführung im Spannungsfeld zwischen Klassik und Online, Stabilität und Individualisierung, Kontrolle und Partizipation

The first panel is with Bernd M. Michael, Gregor Stemmle and Dr. Stefan Tweraser, moderated by Mark Pohlmann.

• Adwords makes up 95% of Google’s revenue… after a small calculation Mark deducts that Google in Germany makes about 2 billion Euros.
• Question posted to the audience sparks the first discussion: can you separate between off- and online.
• Bernd Michael states: there are many experts in this room, but not much knowledge about the effectiveness of what we’re doing in terms of revenue. We are not able to give a 100% media recommendation for ROI.
• Dr. Tweraser:  The seach box mediates between attention and brand promise.
• Michael: The average German knows 3.000 words – how should they memorize 50k+ brands?
• Stemmle: there are examples of successful brands in this digital world – but not built on traditional principles. 
• Zara was mentioned as an example for brands that are successful without any advertising whatsoever. Instead it gew by WoM because of the subjective brand qualty. (Triggered a discussion about subjective vs objective benefits of brands)
• Good advice by Michael: collect casestudies of companies that were successful during the last crisis (2000-2003 or thereabouts). Show these to your clients when talking about facts.
• Stemmle: Use free content online to build your brand – then use the brand power to sell paid content offline.
• Michael: does not agree… calls it a huge strategic blunder, what happened a couple of years ago. Traditional media was to fat, to saturated, they didn’t take the internet serious enough.
• Stemmle: the business of the future for media: prioritization and weighting of content. Defining what’s „talk of the town“…
• Discussion is going back to the original topic: branding today. Tweraser: brand marketing is already a dialogue, some brands already admit that the brand has partially been taken out of their hands.
• Michael: the apple store in NY has a simple way of adding value for R&D: every question that the staff gets and has never heard before, they write down and send it to Cupertino… (Great, that’s what every company with direct customer interaction should do!)
• Markus Roder (in the audience): Viral Marketing can work, when brands give promises and then overdeliver: that triggers excitement and hence word of mouth. 
• Last question by Pohlmann: what’s in it for the future. Stemmle: network, interact. Tweraser: use the information available on the web (Google was able to predict the winner of the eurovision song contest, for esample). advertising is no longer art, it’s a science. Michael: We need experts. It’s still difficult to get experts. Offer more opportunities for knowledge gaining. 

This marks the end of the first session.