Marketing Done Right Through Tech Innovation

Everybody's been to the Next Web Conference last week. Any hands? Nice. Nice. So we're most well known for, indeed, for our events at the Next Web Conference. Last week we had over 10,000 Dundee's in the West Park at the other side of Amsterdam. We're going to be back in New York in November. And the second biggest pillar of the company is our media part in NextWeb.com where we reach over 7 million unique users on a monthly basis. And besides that, we're going to open an office at TQ in July to September probably, which will cover around 6,000 square meters and will host over 100 different tech startups. So that brings a lot of knowledge. This is the biggest event we have ever thrown. What we like to think of ourselves is always trying to grow the business times 10. And that means we need to do a lot with tech innovation, but it also means we fail a lot. Because if you ever heard of innovation, it's usually around tech innovation, which also means that we're still focused on growing times 10, but we fail too often. So I think it's going to be in one of my next slides as well. But in the last year, we ran over 200 different experiments, just trying new stuff, see what our users engages with. And you really find out what works for them and really give them some sense into how they need to behave on the Next Web and how can we have them more engaged with us. Because in the end, the biggest pillar of the Next Web is our media part, and from there, we can move them to other sides of the business. And on the other hand, really what I want to talk about today is really how to innovate, but also how bigger companies do that. So I had the privilege to go to San Francisco, I think two to three months ago now. And I really asked a lot of companies, like the bigger Unicorps that you know out there, like, okay, can I come visit you guys and talk to your marketing people? And just to see what they were working on and what they were thinking about how the future looked like. And the answers were sometimes super easy, like, okay, it doesn't always work for us as well, the innovations that we work on, but at least we give it a lot of tries and we experiment a lot and we fail even more often than you guys probably do. And of course, every presentation needs at least some quote from some famous guy. So I think this is the right quote for this. If you double the number of experiments, you're going to double the inventiveness of your company or the things that you work on. A great quote, of course, by Jeff Bezos, and he was mentioning here also the A-B testing part, which is a big part of the things that we work on in our marketing team. So I was just talking about the hundreds of experiments that we ran last year. And this is the number of percentages of winning things that we did, which was quite high. We were expecting to end somewhere lower 20s. 26% of the things that we do works out. And that's really, of course, the stuff that we really test, of course, a lot of stuff that just works. But I think that also leads back to innovation and how the way you should do things, because we heard a lot about new technologies today and you're probably going to hear more for the rest of the other two days. And that leads back to the things like, okay, how you want to become the next unicorn, unicorn like top 100 companies in the world with like billions of dollars in revenue. And what are the innovations that they are looking at at the moment, because I had the chance to talk to Airbnb and Spotify and really see what their next generation looked like and the things that they were working on. And also leading that back to the next step, we got a lot of information. We're a tech media company. We covered over 70,000 blog posts around technology. And luckily, we receive pitches on a yearly basis, our whole team. I get dozens in my inbox every day. Most of them suck. Too bad for all these marketers that try to pitch me their cruise lines and their CDs of some artists in India that you've never heard of and that I also don't want to promote on the next step as we're a tech company. But it gives a lot of insights. And out of that product, we built eventually Index. It's our tech company database. I'm not going to talk too much about it. I don't want to make this a whole promo talk, which is really about data-driven startup intelligence in the end, because we can collect a lot of data and really see what the innovations are. So in this talk, they really asked me, okay, can you give a lot of, a couple of industries that give some insights into what's moving and what's going ahead and what kind of companies are doing well in certain areas and what are the trends in there? So I picked three of them. We're going to cover a little bit around social media and analytics, because that's really, I think, the biggest pillars of your marketing business at the moment and how you can take that to your advantage in the future. So in this case, I combined social media and content, because when I was researching and building this slide deck for a couple of days now, I really thought, okay, a lot of the content that is already out there is going to be shared more or even more often, because you're already building your social media presence for years now. And how is that going to change? Anybody recognizes this guy? Nobody. Thought so. I also had to Google him, but didn't even recognize the guy. It's Ray Kurzweil. He's the futurist of Google and really thinks about what the future looks like in 20 years from now. This guy is almost never wrong. It's almost annoying to a certain point, because he predicted like 20 years ago what we would be working on right now is just self-driving cars, even more social media, VR, and all these kinds of things. And it really leads back to, of course, the things that we're working on. Facebook was a great talk this morning on how they see the future, people-based marketing, and all the stuff around there. But I think one of the biggest things we're going to see even more, and that's also what he talked about, was more personalization. So last night I was booking my flight tickets for some other cool trip that I can do. And I got this message eventually, because I connect all my personal accounts to my KLM account, and it makes my life easier. Probably a lot of people will say that I'm stupid for giving all my privacy and related info to KLM. But so far I don't have any issues, but I'm usually the opposite in the privacy debate. I love giving my data away if it makes my life easier. And all of a sudden I got this message in my Facebook account again of my flight details for my flight to, I think, London in a couple of months, because it was, yeah, we're going to go to Soham, but cheap, so I needed to book my flight in really in advance to get a cheap ticket. And I love flying KLM, sorry, or Baltic. I wasn't there, flights wouldn't comment on that, by the way. So it really makes it more personalized, and I think that's one of the things that already both KLM and Facebook were trying to do here. And of course you already stole my example in the first talk this morning, which sucks. But I think it leads really back to, of course, that it's becoming way more personalized, because who would have ever thought that you would get your flight tickets into one of your social accounts that you both connected to each other, where you're already sharing way too much privacy information. Quite funny, huh? Anybody recognize this guy, the people who were there last week at the conference then can't ask this. It's Casey Neistat. He's one of the most famous vloggers in the world, video bloggers, for the people who really have no clue what vlogging is. They're always out here somewhere. They shouldn't be hiding. Probably a lot of people, Dutch people know Enzo Kool. I think the guy's name has thousands and thousands of followers. He's one of the biggest in the US as well. And last week he really gave a talk about how he sees the future of vlogging and all that kind of stuff around it. I'm not a huge fan of the guy in the end, but I was at his talk, and he really gave an impressive talk, I'd say, about the things that he saw. So this guy has millions of followers, gets paid like crazy by a lot of companies to do a lot of promotion. But in the end, he always uses this to a good cause as well. So he talked about, okay, what kind of things that we really need to do if I want to be promoted by some company or some brand that I've never heard of. So he gave away most of the money to a good cause by making one of his famous videos. And of course, vlogging is super easy, I thought. And okay, is it really an innovation? It's been done for years already. But I think one of the biggest changes that is becoming way more common to do this, because who here has somebody in his company that's already doing vlogs? Like, nobody, right? Not even us. Like, we're a tech company, we should know how this stuff works. We have no clue how to vlog. And I'm a pretty young guy and I have no clue what I'm doing most of the days in our office. But apparently, it works out because they let me speak at conferences. But in the end, it really makes it that it's getting more personal in the end, I think. And that's one of the even more bigger changes that's going to come to marketing. And it's not really a technology, but I think it's a certain change in the world that's going to happen. Because there is a reason why we would love to watch somebody climb up a ladder in his vlog or eat bananas during lunch. This guy approves and Mark Zuckerberg approves. He bought a whole company that is, I think, by now already worth billions again. Virtual reality, Facebook also talked about it this morning. At some point, we want to experience more what certain content times look like in real life. I would like to show this example. I think it's a great one, but I think it's just the startup where we're going with this. I like the Facebook example even more this morning of like going through a city and really experiencing how it looks like. Hopefully, the audio works. It doesn't, but you also don't really need it. So it's Volvo, as you've obviously seen. So I'm going to do not much more promo for Volvo in the end, but I think the point here is that who buys a car and does it go on a test ride first? But that's pretty annoying, right? You have to go to a car manufacturer or a car dealer or whatever. You have to make an appointment. These people really try to sell you cars. That's why we always refer to them as cheap sellers. But in the end, I think it also leads back to why wouldn't you want to go in virtual reality or really have a look into the car? That might save you a couple of test rides if you're really evaluating the kind of cars that you're looking for. I think that makes it easier as a marketeer to also really see, of course, what you're working on and the opportunities that are out there because sometimes people don't have to go offline to experience this in the end. I think experiencing a city like some Italian city, I think, from Facebook this morning is also a great example of doing that. I think the biggest innovations we see at this side of the content and the social platforms out there that it's going to be even more social. So it's going to be more social platforms and make it more personal in there, but also make it way more data-driven in a certain way. That's, of course, the next thing we're going to talk about is way more the data and analytics side. Big data, everybody's heard about it. I'm not going to do the stupid jokes around that usually. I would like to show this gift. Anybody has any idea what we see here? Usually not. It's a city indeed. It's San Francisco. It's Uber traffic across San Francisco. They made a great visualization, in my opinion, about the traffic there from Uber drivers. I think that's one of the bigger things that we're going to see. Of course, it's always about the data points and the things that we do with them, but it's always about the saving of data as well. So Uber has millions and millions of data points from probably any driver anywhere in the world, and it's going to make it easier. So at the next web, in a certain usual month, we save already over 450 million data points on 7 million users. That's around 60 data points on an average user, and that's only counting clicks, scroll data, or whatever, just to get some sense into how they engage with our content. We have multiple other sources where we collect data on our users, but I have no clue actually to how many million data points that leads up probably to a couple billion, but it gives us a lot of insight into how people read and consume our content. So people always want to save more data, but it also needs to be, of course, valuable to them, so that's why we save data in certain ways so we can say more about the scroll data and the click data. Where do people click? We can easily visualize all the data that we have in our data sets. At some point, as we're working, are we even connecting this to psychographical data? What are you interested in? What kind of things would you want to learn about the user? Are you interested as a movie lover also in technology, but is it really about cooking the end of the day? By knowing that and by learning that, we can get to know the user in a better way without asking him even, because we have so much data across so many data sources. The great thing is, it would be a weird thing to say that you might start a cooking blog as well next to a tech blog, but why not do that if we see that they're also interested in these kind of topics? Don't worry, we're not going to talk about cooking, but movie might be a good next step actually for the next web. I don't remember exactly what Facebook said this morning, but I think it was along the lines of, okay, we might know really what you're after. I think this is a great picture. One of my best friends posted these two pictures this weekend. She was setting up, I think, an ad for one of the campaigns she was running for her company of show jumping. Just because of the picture, Google or Facebook was already able to say it was about show jumping. That's pretty weird, right, if you consider that she only uploaded one picture. I think this says a lot about the data technology and the data-driven and the AI ways of doing things that a lot of companies are already doing, including Facebook, because they know based on one picture, probably out of hundreds and hundreds of pictures that are related to this one, that the topic is show jumping, which is not one of the most popular topics I can imagine on Facebook, or it's just not my favorite thing to look at. I think on the data side, it's really becoming more about even using more data and using more personalization and doing more things there without getting creepy, of course. There was just a question, which is great, of course, was for Lauren, privacy-related. I don't have issues, but I think we should keep on talking about what it means for other people. I don't give a shit in the end what people sometimes do with my data that I give away, at least if I give permission for it. That's also a big discussion, I'd say. But we need to make sure that at least it's taken care of and that it's becoming easier to share and do things with it so we can, indeed, make your world more personalized. I'm not sure if the woman is still in here, but somebody asked with the AirBaltic talk about, okay, can we create segments of people in the plane because I don't want to sit next to crying babies. Well, hell yeah for that, because I fly a ton and I hate sitting next to these people. But I think that's already one of the first steps. KLM started with this, with applying your social profiles to your KLM but in the end, if I check in for a flight and have 450 people on my 747-something flight and only three people I have with Enable, that's still useless to me. So I think it's going to be more useful for KLM and other companies to use other data sources to really get the job done and personalize the way I want to do things. So really what I learned there in the end was a couple of things. I was really surprised by the way that they also sometimes had no clue where the world was going, what they were doing and a lot of ways they were still running behind. A lot of these companies are still not working on cutting edge technologies. I can't say the company, but they said like, yeah, we also want to do email marketing. It's one of the biggest unicorns out there at the moment. But he really said like, yeah, we will still suck at it if we start doing it and we haven't started doing it yet and we're only going to do it next month. It was email marketing, like, welcome to 2005 when this was like a new technology maybe and these big guys aren't even doing that. But I think they at least know the way to go and they can iterate way faster and really innovate their way through it. So hopefully you start working on innovation and do a lot with innovation and the new things that are already out there and it will make you just as excited as we are usually about innovation. Thanks.