GoTech World 2023: Welcome to a new era in Marketing

To all of you who are not familiar with GoTech, allow me to raise your awareness on the importance of attending this global tech event, right here, in Bucharest. If you’ve missed it this year, then please consider joining the list of attendees for the next because a GoTech pass will ensure you are brought face-to-face with the big dogs of tech. Top-tier companies and tech experts across the world have made the commitment to share their secrets and future development plans with an audience of 15.000+ guests interested in learning the ropes of successful entrepreneurship. 

To all of you who are GoTech regulars, what a treat this 2023 edition was. The expo area was brimming with specialists and companies ready to change the world at the quickest pace yet. Each and every company booth offered information, a chance to connect and display their services in the most creative of manners. Starting with the incredible robot dog from Synaptic Systems Romania, following with Continental’s biometric and AI vision scanning protocol, down to Playtika’s virtual “make your own cocktail” game, GoTech had plenty to offer in terms of development, AI, sustainability and upcoming transformation trends. 

The world is most definitely changing and if we blink, we might miss it. 

As Romanian marketers on the hunt for everything new and insightful, our goal attending GoTech went beyond exchanging contacts, meeting new experts or trying out the latest technologies. Our goal at Balistika was to pinpoint the best speakers and more importantly, witness legendary marketing icons make their presentations (and predictions) for what the future of marketing looks like.

Among our “targets”, we will mention the most notable: Antonis Kocheilas, Perla Bloom, Brian J Smyth and of course, Loic Malroux. 

9 Habits of Marketers of the Future

This particular presentation carried out by Antonis Kocheilas, Global CEO of Ogilvy, was easily one of our favorites. There is a pertinent reason why Ogilvy was named the 2023 Global Agency of the Year by Adweek and that reason was thoroughly reinforced by Kocheilas’ presence and well-rounded presentation. 

Among the 9 important habits showcased, a few stood out to us the most. We were in full agreement with the first habit which states that marketers should “seek results not approvals”. Layers and layers of approvals or stroking egos just for the sake of hierarchy will hardly bring you any true results. In the same vein, marketing managers will “pick up ideas, not pick them apart”. As Kocheilas stated, if you become the kind of marketer that will always find the problem within an idea, you will just be the man pointing with your finger, failing to understand what creativity can genuinely do for your company.

Another core idea from Ogilvy which we feel Romanian companies should adopt is “value creativity as an investment, not as a risk.” In other words, if you keep playing it safe, you will never feel comfortable being different ever again and that, unfortunately, is where your success will begin to falter. 

Storytelling in a new world 

The most important revelation we had at GoTech 2023 was during Perla Bloom’s presentation – the Connections Planning Lead on The Sims from Electronic Arts. A marketing force to be reckoned with, Bloom took her place at the stand and declared that in the new world we are all entering, storytelling will remain the constant. Regardless of what shape or form it takes (copywriting, visual, AR or VR), the need to tell a good story will top everything.

In her words, storytelling “acts as a continuous, culturally cohesive narrative” and while the story format never really changes (every story requires a villain, a hero, a helper, a princess and so on), the world around us does and therefore the voice telling the story will have to adapt accordingly. 

Social media & influencer marketing in a giant tech company like Sony. What works and what does not work.

In case you didn’t know, Sony is a tech mogul that has its finger in all the pies. And that is something they take pride in because they do it well and it has earned them timeless success. With his presentation, Loic Malroux, Pan-European Social Media and Community Manager for Sony let us in on the unexpected secrets to social media success. 

As their business model dictates, when it comes to social media marketing, Sony has several objectives they need to accomplish. Goals such as growing followers, prioritising brand awareness in order to influence purchase decisions and staying relevant through engagement and content are just a few of the bricks that build Sony’s presence on social media. In fact, a crucial goal is that of entertaining both the audience and yourself and for that, you need to remain loyal to your creativity. At times, you don’t need a big production to draw in engagement; sometimes, knowing your brand and audience well can ensure that even a simple photo taken at your office for example, showcasing a product naturally can have a long-lasting impact. Oh, and one more piece of information that will surely not surprise you is that influencer marketing is consistently declining. 

Hype vs Reality: Gen AI and Metaverse

The way Brian J Smyth, Global Communications, Media & Technology Innovation Lead at Accenture, began his presentation was with the pressing question on everyone’s mind: “Will AI steal our jobs?” As expected, the answer to that question is complex and you guessed it, complicated. One thing is for sure though, companies that refuse to align themselves to the new AI reality will suffer the consequences of being left behind. As much as we fight it, tech and marketing are changing and AI is, undoubtedly, the future. 

Since Accenture is as a business entity that likes to speak numbers, we were presented with facts: Soon enough, 20% of coding will be written by AI, 30% of copywriting will be done by AI, 90% of quarterly reports will be generated by AI and 50% of drug development will also be accomplished by Generative AI. However, by the end of his conclusions, Smyth did take a virtual stone off our chests and implied that AI’s purpose is not to replace us but to make our lives easier.

Either way, we will all be here to witness the new changes in tech take effect as they influence the course of our reality. Events such as GoTech are meant to familiarize us with tech evolution and assure us that everything is unfolding to our benefit, pushing forward the limits we humans, experts, marketers and developers constantly aim to overcome. 

We are looking forward to the next GoTech World event in 2024, eager to see how things have changed and how much more we are able to evolve.