People, stories, digital trends

A crowd of people who have not made it into the room are gathering in front of the door. Every seat in the auditorium has been taken and on stage, Sonja Knab, director of Partner Studio at BurdaForward, and Kolja Kleist, director of customer & brand management at BurdaForward Advertising, are giving a talk on “What is the right content strategy for my brand?”. We are at Dmexco trade fair in Cologne, attended by 41 000 visitors. Participants’ lively interest in this presentation shows that content marketing is again a burning issue at Europe’s biggest trade fair for digital marketing and advertising this year.

Content marketing remains perennial issue

Sonja Knab sums up the most important findings of the new “Native Navigator” study: “It is always necessary to address your campaign goal very clearly. Then you know what key performance indicators are relevant. After that you look at how the brand is positioned, what the content-related expertise is like and when you have to place your content on media brands.”

Using stories to inspire people

As they walk across Dmexco, visitors are overwhelmed by impressions of countless digital trends at 1 100 stands. Intoxicated, they end up wondering: “Are we digitally drunk?”. Board member Philipp Welte reminded the audience in the panel discussion of the same name of the strengths of magazines: “When people speak about advertising today, everyone keeps talking about data points and eyeballs, as if it was a matter of behavioral research on primates. In fact, this is about people!” People wanted to be won over and inspired by stories. Therefore good advertising was mainly based on content.

Is mobile technology everything?

Crowds of people are pushing from one stand to another in the endless long corridors of the Cologne fair, with many of them repeatedly staring at their smartphones. Mobile technology has long been more than a trend. The panel “Is Mobile Everything?” focused on mobile technologies and the way they change users’ behavior. Martin Lütgenau, managing director of BurdaForward Advertising, got his point across in a discussion with representatives from Nestlé and United Internet Media: “We don’t think along the lines of purely mobile or purely desktop: we think about multi-screen technology. What users want is to ‘read the news’. They can look at them on screens of different sizes in different user situations, but the use case is always the same. Therefore we sell multi-screen and not individual platforms. We take a cross-brand view on this.”

„We have done our homework“

At the close of Dmexco 2017, Tanja zu Waldeck, COO at BurdaForward, joined representatives from Facebook, AGOF and OWM (Organisation Werbungtreibende im Markenverband) at the panel “How to Get Hold of Our Online Ad's Success - And What's Beyond Viewability?. Tanja zu Waldeck sums up: “The panel discussion has shown once again that we have done our homework: Our goodvertising strategy, especially the new ad model and our 100% viewability approach, already meets the current demands of OWM (Organisation Werbungtreibende im Markenverband).”