At the 14th Interactive Advertising Bureau Forum in Italy, Mario Montemagno brilliantly moderated his guests speaking about chatbots, space tourism, human interfaces and much more. Meanwhile, at the ground floor, advertisers, publishers and digital enthusiasts met up to qualify and to confirm their business relations among the 15,000 attendees and 70 exhibitors.
‘Limitless’ was the leitmotif connecting each talk to a whole range of topics from hyperloop transportation technology and the human-user interface to the discussion panel about the future of news making, native advertising, publishing business models and automation in content creation.
IAB is an essential window on the digital industry in Italy and in Europe. Every year, the IAB Forum is a chance to examine and evaluate the state of the industry. Marta Valsecchi, from the Digital Innovation Observatory at Politecnico University provided a report on “2016 Italian industry digital ad spending” and showed a growing trend with a clear incremental pace on social and video.
Besides the data-driven talk conducted by Academic speaker from Milan polytechnic university, Shingy known as AOL’s “Digital Prophet”, spoke for 20 minutes in one of his speculative but entertaining presentation about innovative technologies.
A string of unrelated slides jumped between the last technological innovations and their consequences giving glimpses of truths like the importance of bringing new technology only if they are easy and fun to use and even more important easily usable by large part of audiences. That would explain why the Google glasses didn’t take off compared to Snapchat’s Spectacles.
Mikael Yang introduced his ManyChat, a platform for brands allowing them to build their own chat-bot without using a line of code. He stressed the need for brands to jump on the chat wagon. According to his vision, messenger apps represent the current way to reach out to every customer in a meaningful and lasting way. He proved his view by showing the opening rate of chat-bot being far more high than any successful newsletters.
As for the hardware, John Underkoffler came to the stage showing the Minority Report user interface as a product that his company invented and currently selling to other businesses and research institutes around the world. In his vision the future is not only “virtual reality” or “augmented reality” but “Real-Reality” where pixels will be part of our physical environment.
Elon Musk is involved in some of the most innovative projects around the world. It is less known that there is a small group of companies working on the hyperloop technology, TransPod is one of them. Its CEO, Sebastien Gendron, was in Milan inspiring the IAB audience about the future of transportation with a clean, efficient and fast technology. He was even more happy to tell that TransPod just closed an important funding deal with an Italian investor.
So many people, so little time to see them all. IAB Forum put together not only digital industry leaders and vendors, but also inspiring lectures. Since we are a digital agency we like to close with Cindy Gallop. She defines herself as the “Michael Bay of advertising” and founded some unconventional brand. What she teaches and mentors managers around the world is based on repeating her motto “I like to blow shit up“ and acting as an instrument of change instead of looking for a corner where to adapt ourselves.
Hope you enjoy our IAB Forum 2016 recap as we really did enjoy. And we would like to thank all the organizations behind it for their professionalism and kindness. Indeed they were limitless!
Daniele Federico is a Social Media Specialist at Emoderation. Follow him on Twitter @daninbrief
