Conferencia Anual APAN: Visão de Futuro with Barry Wacksman from R/GA

Last week, at the 7th i had the extraordinary opportunity to attend to APAN's annual conference "Visão de Futuro" that brought to portugal one of  best specialists in digital marketing, Barry Wacksman, Chief Growth Officer da R/GA, which is one biggest digital agencies of the USA and the world.

Also, i was presented with some other fantastic testimonials about the the new paradigm of brand communication and the impact of the digital in the traditional advertising from Anthony Gibson, president of the group Publicis, Filipe Bonina, marketing director of Coca-Cola Portugal, Miguel Figueiredo, founder and CEO of Excentric and André Freire de Andrade, CEO of Aegis Media Ibéria.

The big picture from R/GA was surrounding this idea: "We believe that the marketing industry is driven by a simple formula. The technology transforms consumers and customers turn the agencies.The agencies that focus on changing perceptions will eventually settle down, while the agencies that create transformative experiences that change customer behavior, are rising. For many reasons, we believe that R/GA who is leading this transformation of the industry and represents an entirely new agency model, for our customers, we are the main partner in the digital arena."

Now in the interest of sharing ill explain this new model that most companies will have to apply in order to avoid failure. Instead of creating more and more totally different products in a horizontal strategy, the future lies on creating a set of products that rely on each other to produce value.

Let me explain this in a more suitable way, with a cliché example but that is in fact the best one, Apple. They first started with mackintosh, which in the beginning wasn't the first choice when buying a computer since it was more directed for professional work. 

However, one day Apple launched iTunes, a piece of software that revolutioned the industry of music as it allowed anyone to freely digitize music and burn cds at their liking with different songs. After that, the iPod came out and BAM! everyone went out there and bought one and with which program would you pass the musics to it? exactly.. iTunes. This goes on, whit iPad, iPhone, etc.

All these products syncronise and are used together to create value. In order to have the full experience you need all of the products and there we can find the secret for success in the coming future. Every company will need to get on board of this new strategy, for example even a car brand like BMW is already doing so, with new services for the costumer, on board technology to maximize the experience of driving and so on.

Ill end here with my part of the testimonial with a word of appreciation for these, lets call them "gurus" that clearly shared a huge amount of knowledge and insight about the future. Thank you.