ATCOM NEXT TAKEAWAYS

IF YOU OBEY ALL THE RULES, YOU MISS ALL THE FUN

This famous quote by Katharine Hepburn is also the mantra for ATCOM Next, an exclusive one-day conference on the future of digital business. Last week TOPOSOPHY was at the trendy Gazarte event space in Athens there to disobey all the rules, and join in the fun.

In a race to get personal with consumers, pump out content and sell, sell sell, it can be very easy to overlook the fun part of digital business and lose the human touch. Yet those elements are actually what make your brand stand out and engage consumers in the first place. This was a common theme that ran through all the presentations at this year’s edition of ATCOM Next, hosted by leading e-business consultancy and digital agency ATCOM (of which TOPOSOPHY is a part).

Ten speakers from leading tech brands talked about the need for intelligent personalisation, smart ways to engage consumers in unexpected places and how to make it all work seamlessly via cloud-based solutions. We’re proud that over 400 representatives from leading consumer brands and tech firms joined us at one of Athens’ most hip venues, but and in case you weren’t lucky enough to join, we decided to bring you a few highlights from the day: 

The best technology makes life easier, improves good habits and helps you to cut out bad ones

AOL’s Digital Prophet David Shing gave an outstanding keynote in which he talked about digital dummies for babies, wristbands that shock you when you reach for another drink, and Visa’s paywave which sees technology built into a suit for contactless payments (though with this, maybe it’s best to check your bank balance at the end of the day..). Essentially, to deliver solutions that will really work for consumers, you have to observe and slot seamlessly into regular human behaviour. Make it too complex or creepy, and it’ll put people off for life. 

Businesses aren’t competing with other businesses for consumers’ attention. They’re competing with individuals

Whether you’re working with influencers or pumping out home-grown content, it’s time to get realistic and understand that everyone (yes, everyone) has an audience today. Social media has given everyone a platform to show off their skills as an artist, blogger, stylist, designer or DJ. If there ever was any doubt, you’re no longer in the advertising business, you’re in the content business! How, then, to get the leading edge and stand out? You have to look beyond your own sector and work with influencers who are moving popular culture forward in a way that will reflect well on your own brand. It’s something we urge tourism businesses to do all the time!

Personalisation: the art of getting it just right

Katerina Karagianni, TOPOSOPHY’s head of User Experience (UX) explained how consumers increasingly expect the systems they interact with to get the special offers, product suggestions, language, tone of voice, USPs and default customer data right from the very start (check out her presentation here). There is, after all, a big difference between the user who may be simply looking to ‘find out more’ and the frequent visitor to a site who could be persuaded to ‘book now’. However the data that help you to know the difference between these customers has to be handled with care and intelligence, and should be easily transferred across multiple platforms through cloud-based systems such as Microsoft Azure (a key reason for the partnership between ATCOM and Microsoft Hellas).

Clever screens aren’t just on your desk or in your hand

Thanks to the high definition and quality audio available through interactive display panels, today the best big screens give consumers a good reason to look up from the small screen in their hand.Powered by clever design and a lot of imagination, the best screens bring passing consumers (or of course, travellers) as close as it’s possible to get to reality, and make life easier, something we all got to see for ourselves during the breaks.

Or take for example, ATCOM’s funky interactive display window at Athens’s top Kaligirou department store. John Mantas, Commercial Director of LG Electronics Hellas (another official ATCOM partner) gave us a reason to laugh as he showed how LG’s OLED screens terrified nervous interviewees in Chile with a screen that was so realistic it appeared as a window, and wowed us with one of the company’s biggest creations to-date: an enormous curved display screen hanging above the crowds at Seoul Incheon Airport. 

Digital business has brought the future of travel closer than you think

Discussing the dynamics of travel and tourism with an audience who aren’t necessarily from the travel industry is something that we at TOPOSOPHY really enjoy doing. In this case, Manolis Psarros our Managing Director explained how tech has brought the future of travel much closer since it’s being used to enhance and deliver a whole range of services at all stages of the customer journey:

The opportunities for travel and non-travel brands to engage with consumers digitally are infinite, and helps to explain why TOPOSOPHY as a company is designed in such a unique way. As a 360º agency we’re able to draw upon ATCOM’s vast expertise (150+ designers, engineers, programmers and UX specialists handling over 3,000 digital implementation projects per year) to help our clients boost their business through persuasive marketing, UX, Design, Development, Digital Campaigns and much more. This of course, is in addition to the services that we offer in strategy and planning, marketing and branding.

If you’d like to know more, take a look around our refreshed website www.toposophy.com. It won last year’s Red Dot Marketing Award, and was designed by our own in-house designers. We hope you’ll see how we like to do things differently, and we’d like to help you do that too!