This year, C.E.S. debuted its first-ever C Space Storytellers conference track, created to explore the relationship among brands, agencies, media, and technology. The program brought top thinkers together for panels and sessions from January 5 to 7 at Aria in Las Vegas.
C Space is the hub for more than 25,000 C.E.S. attendees from the advertising, marketing, and digital content communities. This year was the program’s second run—with 300 percent larger exhibit space and conference involvement.
Marketers from Facebook, Target, Google, and more gathered on stage for the new Storytellers track to offer insights on what consumers want and expect right now—and what pitfalls to avoid.
“One of the challenges for marketers is to figure out how to reach people in the most concentrated way on the most personal device. But that’s not the only trend that’s happening with mobile: Messaging is exploding. One of the things that consumers are expecting is to have a personal relationship that is easy and useful and delightful in these messaging experiences. [It’s about] simplifying the consumer experience. But consumers have more expectations around messaging: They’re expecting the ability to communicate with businesses. The consumer expectation is that they can have a personal dialogue. That’s going to fundamentally change customer service and the way people and businesses interact. It’s also becoming all visual. The written language is a barrier [to millennials who expect to live in] a borderless society, so we see a complete explosion around visual communication.”
Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions, Facebook
“So much of today’s marketplace and social media is so immediate. Everybody wants to know what’s going on in your world today, and then they forget about it tomorrow. So I tend to have a bird’s-eye perspective: I’m not that concerned about being a trending topic today or the hottest this year, when you have a trajectory and you’re trying to build a 25- or 50-year-long career. I love the immediacy of social media but that doesn’t mean that that’s going to resonate forever, so I might be upset about something [and react online] and that’s my move for the day. But you try to build something over the course of time, so I try to approach it from that: I try to create a body of work that will sustain over time.”
Nick Cannon, founder and C.E.O., NCredible Entertainment
[PULLQUOTE]
“One of the biggest pieces of feedback we get from consumers is, ‘You understand a lot about me [from data you’ve already collected], so if I see things that aren’t relevant to me, you’re not doing a very good job.’ There are consumers who are concerned about the amount of data, and there is a balancing act that certainly we’re always in. But certainly consumers are expecting, ‘If you have this indication from me that I’ve done something, please don’t ask me again.’ And that expectation is going up.”
Gary Briggs, C.M.O. and vice president of product marketing, Facebook
“The interesting thing about social is it’s now the place where ease and inspiration are coming together. Social plays an enormous business value because we can blend ease and inspiration to transaction. It wasn’t that long ago that social was that free place to do novel things. The next step is engagement, but how do you make engagement be more than just likes and comments? We’ve discovered that when we can take a topic that guests are really passionate about, and leverage the power of these platforms to rally them behind that cause or topics, we see incredible results. If we can blend ease and inspiration, then social becomes a really core driver of traffic.”
Jeff Jones, C.M.O., Target
“We have a user that’s incredibly demanding. They expect us to know who they are and what they are doing, and they want us to engage them far more personally then ever before. Our challenge as marketers is to make mindset shifts to win in this new age—being there and being relevant in the moments that matter. We have to focus on the moments when consumers are open to engaging with our brands: those, ‘I wanna know, go, do, and buy’ moments. These are the new opportunities to win hearts, minds, and dollars in the new age of digital. We also have to rethink storytelling. We have to commit to making it more personal and shareable.”
Margo Georgiadis, president of the Americas, Google
“When you’re running a company and you’re living in a time of great change, you have a bunch of different choices. But the most important thing you can do is to lean in [when] trying to build a company. You get in trouble when the world is changing if you try to preserve the status quo and preserve the world you’ve been in. It can be scary and off-putting, but if you come in every day and say, ‘We’re not afraid to make bets and keep moving,’ over the course of decades you can create something special. It doesn’t always work. We’ve made plenty of mistakes, and we’ll make more in the future. But one of our mistakes will not be not investing, not taking risks, and not trying to grow the company.”
Steve Burke, C.E.O., NBC Universal
