Web Summit 2019

I like to think of content marketing as a first date. If you ever talk about yourself, there won't be a second one.

​We are the only thing that can protect everyone. Not technology, not law. We have to protect us.

Shareholder value is no longer everything, top CEO's have obligations to society.

Having sex with robots will be a common practice in less than 50 years.

A marketer needs to be customer centric, purpose driven, creative…but in the end the final mission of a marketer is to deliver growth.

You need to find the balance between disrupting your businessmodel but not disrupting your entire business​.

Getting attention isn't actually that difficult, but sustaining it is. ​When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

In 75% of the cases, a poor product experience will lead to a loss of trust in a brand.

Passionate about health care marketing, it was a true pleasure for me to attend the Web Summit! Listening to the inspirational talks & visiting the start-up booths helped me to gather a lot of insights on how technologies are evolving. Based on what I've seen, the future for healthcare looks promising, but also challenging! The main challenge will be to keep the patient/consumer in the center while implementing new technologies like machine learning, AI, robots,…in our decisions.

What is more awesome than entering a conference that has been named ‘best tech conference on the planet’ and ‘Glastonbury for geeks’? The three day conference indeed brings up the festival kind of feelings of excitement! Watching both start-ups and large corporates innovate with all kinds of technologies in any industry you can think of is simply mind-blowing. In one scentence: AI and machine learning are being implemented at a large scale now, drone-delivery is luring around the corner and robots will play a huge roll in our lives by 2050 if not sooner.

How should I describe the Web Summit? ‘The Davos for tech geeks’, ’The Rolls Royce of tech events’ or ‘The Tomorrowland for marketing professionals’? All apply. As a marketing and ecommerce passionate I enjoyed this real place of learning, with about 23 stages bringing together over 1,000 speakers. I saw an inspiring mix of lectures by managers, speeches by thought leaders, keynotes by celebrities and success stories by founders. The talks went from innovation, ecommerce, mobility, fashion, AI to privacy and sustainability. You can experience where the future is headed from the front row. I returned charmed by the beautiful city of Lisbon, which looked entirely absorbed in the great conference, organised with a flourish.

With a true passion for marketing and innovation, it’s amazing to see how marketing has been transforming over the past years. As marketing and technology are growing even more closely together in the near future, the possibilities in terms of customer centricity are endless. A challenge? For sure! But … even more a real opportunity for many companies. I'm sure that the Web Summit convinces a lot of people to start looking at changes and innovations as possibilities instead of threats. Looking forward to see what else is still to come!