For the fourth year in a row, Condé Nast Digital Day brings together over 500 leading marketing and communications professionals from the luxury industry. This year’s conference, which was held last week in Moscow, offered a special focus on e-commerce: how to build your sales online, how different is the online customer and its buying behaviour, what is to be considered when building your own e-commerce for a luxury brand.
Other sessions covered the changing media landscape and new creative opportunities, marketing alcohol brands in a ‘dark market’, best digital marketing cases, the new generation of entrepreneurs and best technology startups.
Condé Nast has entered a phase of extreme creativity while integrating its digital and print divisions, and explores all available media channels to influence the consumer, stated Anita Gigovskaya, President of Condé Nast Russia, when opening the conference. ‘If twenty years from now people will use holographic screens instead of tablets, or will use pictures projected on Google Glasses, contact lenses, or inside the human eye directly, we will produce quality media products in these formats’, she added.
James Bilefield, President of Condé Nast International Digital, reported on the exponential growth of mobile internet and stated, that currently 90% of all human media interactions happen on a screen, and 38% – on a smartphone. He noted that top luxury producers create both mobile websites and mobile apps to comply with their communication objectives.
Gaydar Magdanourov, Investment Director at Runa Capital, spoke about how technological innovations change everyday life. He pointed out revolutional innovations (invention of book printing, radio, devices, social media, DNA decoding and 3D-printing) and evolutional innovations (digital content, mobile communications, cloud computing and cloud services). Gaydar suggested tech startups should focus on areas lacking automatisation and IT: medical services, digital state services, financial services, education and small businesses.
Nikolay Kononov, Editor-in-Chief of Hopes & Fears believes that the Internet has made the life of small businesses simpler and more complex at the same time. Social media and the Internet shorten the path to the end consumer, and make communication more accessible and efficient. On the other hand, competition boundaries fade away, and the new entrepreneurs have to be faster and more competitive to succeed.
Vitaliy Bykov, Managing Director of Red Keds Creative Agency presented a choice of best creative cases of the year: campaigns of Only, ‘Call It Spring’ shoes collection for Debenhams, Wonderbra, Tiffany True Love, Bvlgari, Montblanc, all heavily relying on digital technologies in their creation.
Andrey Busina, Managing Director of Smetana Digital Communications Agency, and Seedr, gave an amazing presentation on how advertising is driven by emotions. Busina presented an ironical account of the 7 ways to develop a viral creative idea and showed a multitude of viral marketing cases: the New Year address of President Medvedev, ‘Viruses Are Not Cured For Free’ campaign for the Kaspersky Anti-Virus software lab, the talking hampster for WoodyOTime, Red Bull Stratos, GoPro cameras, Wideroe Norway airlines, Carlsberg, David Beckham for H&M, Mercedes Benz. ‘Advertising that does not look like advertising, moves our emotions. If you think of it, an energy drink has a better space campaign than a space program of a single country’.
Michael Semiz, Bacardi Russia Marketing Director, have a presentation called ‘The Dark Side of Business’ and covered communications strategies of an alcohol brand which faces strictly limited communications channels, and covered marketing initiatives, where it is the users themselves who create branded content.
A session on a changing media landscape was opened by Andrew Betts, Founder and Director of FT Labs. Andrew presented the experience of FT in inventing new channels of newspaper and magazine distribution, creating paywalls online, and html5 mobile applications, which can be distributed directly from the browser. ‘Protocol and technology should not create boundaries for content distribution. Magazine products can’t compare in quality to social interactions. We are looking for ways to keep journalism as a valuable and rare craft’.
Pasha Romanovsky, Managing Partner at the Socialit, was talking about social media strategies of brands. He specifically stressed media projects starting on social networks, uniting fans and subscribers over Facebook, VK, Instagram and other social media, like the Bon Appetit project launched in VK.
Aslaug Magnusdottir, Co-Founder and CEO of Moda Operandi, opened the session on the new retail. She shared her own experience in creating a premium online retail fashion company, granting customers the chance to preorder fashion clothing directly from the catwalk show.
Aslaug put together the 10 practical rules of conduct for those launching a fashion startup online.
The discussion continued in an online retail round table, moderated by Slon.ru’s MD Maxim Kashulinsky. Aslaug Magnusdottir (Moda Operandi), Jose Neves (Farfetch.com), Chris Morton (Lyst.com), Mira Duma and Maxim Roslyakov (TSUM) shared their experiences on the consumer, on marketing, sales structures, and issues they encounter when selling fashion online.
The conference ended with a conversation between famous Russian movie producer Alexander Rodnyansky and Ksenia Solovieva, Editor-in-Chief of Tatler Russia on Rodnyansky’s new movie, to be out in 2014, based on ‘The Durov Code’, a biopic on VK Founder Pavel Durov. Rodnyansky mentioned he was fascinated by the human story in the book: ‘It will be a movie about people, relationships, big money, politics, not a movie about Vkontakte’. Alexander Rodnyansky believes that nowadays popular heroes appear and become stars inside and thanks to social networks.
Rodnyansky is not present in social networks – ‘I have plenty of opportunities to express myself elsewhere’, – but he is an active follower professionally: ‘I do read Twitter accounts of Matthew Vaughn or other cinematographers’, he stated. He is against video piracy online, but believes ‘it is difficult to make people stop stealing content online, when we live with the present level of corruption in all spheres’. He has called for finding compromises with piracy websites to ban pre-release.
The event was live-streamed online. A full video archive of the CNDD 2013 conference and all presentations is available at www.cndd.ru
For more news on Condé Nast, please visit www.condenast.ru, follow @condenastrussia on Twitter, or visit the company’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/condenastrussia
