Last week, Nate, Greg and I attended the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen.
Fortune Brainstorm is an annual conference hosted at the Aspen Institute, with speakers including big names like Katie Aronowitz, Design Director at Facebook, Neil Ashe, CEO of e-Commerce at Wal-Mart, John Donahue, CEO of eBay and Jennifer Dulski, President of Change.org. The conference also included some emerging voices in the tech world such as Ben Elowitz from Wetpaint.com, Alex Ljung from SoundCloud, Steve Stoute from Translation Advertising and Ryan Holmes from Hootsuite.
See Rogues Gallery here
Attending conferences can make your head spin in terms of new learnings as well as reinforce the obvious. It is amazing how central themes such as authenticity, (important, yes, yet not so easy to execute) and mobile continue to dominate the topline discussion.
Here are three highlights we left with:
Greg:
1 – Nothing ground breaking, it is all about MOBILE. Even Walmart, the largest brick and mortar retailer globally, sees mobile as a central and key driver of new customers and additional revenue with existing customers.
2 – The largest potential impact to retail is the very real possibility of Amazon same day delivery. It is currently in beta and working in Seattle. Once the model is perfected, it will be a game changer.
3 – Everything comes back to a quality consumer experience end to end, which includes content to ecomm. Even today there are relatively few brands getting it all right.
Nate:
Authenticity, authenticity, authenticity.
(When Nate was prodded – dude, c’mon you gotta do better than that…)
1 – The distinction between social media and social networks. Social media is the shared content. The network is the infrastructure to share.
2 – The fact that even in a room full of tech icons, representing huge brands and leading media, everyone is still struggling to mine actionable, real-time data from the social web. Many are working on it and making progress (including Adobe which surprised me) but no one seems remotely satisfied with where we are today in terms of analyzing and leveraging social insights.
3 – To paraphrase Jeff Zucker from CNN “we want to be more essential to more consumers more often.”
Penn: the hardest part about going last is not copping out and agreeing with what has already been said.
1 – Art and music are pure forms that shape society and culture. People aspire to adopt cultures that resonate with them personally. The best brands understand this and realize the rate of product acceptance is tied to brand relevance from a cultural adoption and community perspective.
2 – From a marketing standpoint collaboration and the need or lack thereof is directly related to the size of the opportunity.
3 – To paraphrase Steve Stoute, ‘Samsung did not care about Jay-Z holding their phone they cared about his content flowing through their phone.”
See you out there.