Next, Dr. Peter Figge (CEO of Jung von Matt, an ad agency, @jvmnext on Twitter) gave an outstanding talk about the integration of social media in traditional marketing communications. He presented an impressive list of good examples how to do it, but also mentioned some failures. Let’s start with the latter: Pril, Germany's No. 1 hand dishwashing detergent tried to crowdsource its new packaging. The winning design (according to popular internet vote) is shown below: The tag line read (in German): “Great taste... like chicken”. It’s clear that Henkel was unable to produce this packaging.

It even lead to an answer from the blogosphere: a true parody of the commercial above...

In this picture  Prof. Dr. Manfred Krafft is holding Pril’s package, the one they did produce in limited quantities. Moreover, the design ranked second was the following (see picture below):

Next, Dr. Peter Figge (CEO of Jung von Matt) went on by explaining their “Giro sucht Hero” (current account is looking for a hero) campaign for Sparkasse (a German savings bank). Joko and Klaas are two MTV VJs in Germany, so well-known hosts to a young audience, which was the target audience for this campaign. Below, you can watch one of the funny campaign videos demonstrating the new app of the bank (in German).

The bank did not want to disclose detailed results, but it was very successful among its intended target audience. Next, Dr. Peter Figge highlighted another excellent example of how to put social media to work in your marketing strategy. German internet provider 1&1 had a customer service problem. They decided to prominently feature their new customer service chief: Marcel D’Avis. An important part of the campaign was monitoring all social media to detect any “bad service” messages, to resolve them Wacht the commercial below (in German):

Mr. Mario Schwegler wrapped up with the commercial by Microsoft aired in the US, which emphasizes the “loss of privacy”, i.e. the price you pay by using the free GMail service instead of using the “privacy preserving” Microsoft Office 365 products.

Dr. Peter Figge (CEO of Jung von Matt) finished by talking about the hype status of some innovations (such as QR codes, location-based services, ...). In sum, a great talk by a visionary CEO!

The third keynote talk of the morning was by Dr. Michael Kern (President of ZAW, i.e. Germany's umbrella association of advertising; see picture on the left) without slides. It contained a lot of critical reflections, mixed with some humor... refreshing!

After a walking dinner, the afternoon started with break-out sessions. I (@dirkvandenpoel) decided to attend the talk by Dr. Dirk Kall (CRM Sales manager at Deutsche Telekom, the number one telecom provider in Germany). The main take-away message of his talk are: 1. Don’t underestimate the importance of direct marketing offers during inbound calls driven by predictive analytics; 2. Biggest inhibiting factors to putting analytics to work: IT & motivating sales reps. In the picture below Prof. Dr. Manfred Krafft (University of Münster, on the left) introduces Dr. Kall.

During the second break-out session, I attended David Eicher’s (CEO of Webguerillas GmbH, @de_webguerillas on Twitter) talk. His very inspiring talk included the following take aways: 1. Social media give existing CRM additional momentum; 2. Users take a much more active approach with regard to the brands they love. He illustrated his point with their longrunning Mammut.ch social media campaign:150 social media users to climb 150 peaks (of highest mountains). In the picture below, you see David Eicher, Prof. Dr. Ralf Wagner & yours truly: Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel.

Moreover, one of David Eicher’s main points was that traditional marketing campaigns come in waves, social media offer the potential to be cumulative (see picture below).

After this very interesting conference sponsored by the Siegfried Vögele Institut and Deutsche Post, I visited Prof. Dr. Ralf Wagner’s office. In the picture below, you see him with Katrin Zulauf.

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