Wilmar's Web Summit: Final day highlights

I am covering my personal WebSummit, which is the biggest tech conference in Europe according to Reuters, and the Guardian calls the Glastonbury for Geeks. Here are the highlights of day four.

Make sure to check out day one, two and three!

Five truths for making great creative work

Global Chief Marketing Officer Fernando Machado at Burger King shared with us his 5 creative rules:

1. Creativity has the power to bend reality like nothing else has. Testament to that is their recent video starring a very small English football club Stevenich.
2. If it looks like and ad, sounds like an ad, and smells like an ad it probably isn’t a good ad (I would like to add that in that case it definitely will not get you enough earned attention!)
3. No Money No Problem - be creative despite or better yet because you have less budget
4. First or Nothing - our Creative Director’s Rens Quirijnen’s favorite, if it’s been done before don’t do it
5. Stretch and learn - really challenge the status quo and be radical and disruptive

The new agency world

My former top boss at WPP Martin Sorrell (I know him, he will probably never hear about me ;) gave his view on what he’s building with S4 Capital. He pointed out high quality with speed is now so much more important than it used to be. As an agency you can no longer wait for a week to set a date, another two weeks for a debrief and then reveal your big plan. You need to move much faster, the world within a company can totally change within a week. A quote from a different talk that springs to mind in that respect is “let’s not let good be the victim of perfect”.

I am not sure I agree with Sorell’s view on disregarding anything traditional in media. I am more in the Machado camp who says he wants to have a strategy and then think about the means in which to bring that strategy to life. Mostly through a mix of earned media first, adding paid and owned.

Human decency for all

In line with what Richard Edelman said a couple of days ago, Amnesty International’s very inspiring and aspiring Secretary General Kumi Naidoo asked us to take a stand and challenge our leaders in work, politics or otherwise to fight for human decency for all. Also in line with Edward Snowden earlier he challenged us on if we feel it’s right that so much power on data and privacy is in the hands of a few big companies and governments. Something European Commissioner for justice Vera Jourová also built upon by saying it is not the EU’s goal to break up big tech per se, but it is their goal to make sure human rights are defended. Sounds like a plan.

So that was WebSummit 2019. WOW what a week. I’ll definetely be back in 2020. In the meantime stay tuned on hetprbureau.nl for more blogs and news or get in touch with us if you have any questions.