Festival of Media Global is the foremost congregation of high-level decision makers in the $1 trillion international advertising industry. With agendas crafted to transform challenges into solutions Festival of Media has five iterations around the world – Rome, Dubai, Miami, Singapore and New York.
The inspiring two-day conference at Rome between 13-15 May, showcased the very latest in media thinking, with insights from the world’s most prominent brand CMOs, most powerful media executives and most pioneering innovators with attendees exploring opportunities to network and do business with the most important players in the industry across the globe.
Jeremy King CEO – Festival of Media spoke exclusively to tvnews4u.com on how the Festival uniquely differs from other international Media summits and what kind of exclusive value the attendees tend to gain from the festival.
Excerpts:
Q.How different do you think is this summit from Cannes?
Actually, this summit came out with a group of people from Cannes 13 years ago, all from our founder Johny Cook, came up with an idea about what you can do, a bunch of global media CEO’s, like Mike Cooper, Steve Allen, Jack Clues, came up with an idea. It is nothing but celebrates creativity, it celebrates media, how media works, how media operates, as a result, the festival of media was born, to celebrate everything from the media perspective, so what we did is we chose our routes and connected with media guys, this event is a boutique as we have around 750 delegates here, one venue for two days and it concentrates on bringing the whole story of media, on how media works and how media operates with e-commerce and mobile, how media works with programmatic, how TV works in the digital space. What we try to do is, three things, Educate, Inspire and Celebrate Media excellence around the world.
Q. Can you just explain to us how Old is festival of media?
Yes Sir, this will be the 12th edition of the festival of media, so its 12 years old now. It initially started in Venice, then it moved to Montero, Valencia and then this has been the home for the fest for last five years at Rome in a row and one of the reasons we have kept it here because the industry started to cue the event in Rome, necessarily like advertising festival in Cannes, they started coming to Festival of Media in Rome. It is very exciting to be in one venue where people are happy to come and more importantly this event has transformed remarkably during the course of past12 years. So those were days when Media agencies ran media, and now the brands of the advertisers are taking back control. So as an event we are more focused towards those advertisers. In our haul of events, the majority of the audience are advertisers from Danon to Nike to Adidas to L’oreal to Unilever to P&G. They have come here to understand the new media landscape and work out on how they can better the efficiency of their teams and ultimately deliver best results in products and service uplift.
Q. How has the response been this year? As far as our understanding goes there are a lot of Asians, a lot of Indians who travel to Cannes. Could you just take us through, what was the response globally versus Asian, how has been the participation?
Certainly, this year we have worked on four year plan which is working upon inclusivity, and advertisers at the heart of everything we do, the content is inclusive and we are representing not just all parts of the world but all parts of the society, from disability to sexual orientation to females, covering all of the sections. Ensuring the event represent society, so this year it’s really amazing as our jury in the awards judging is completely inclusive. Actually there are more females in the judgement than never before, we have people from different parts of the world than never before and from the gender perspective 57 percent of our speakers are female, which is really exciting, so we are trying to move away from that traditional conference format which is full of middle age white men and actually have a conference that represents society that has all of the flavors, all of the opinions and the conversations that are required to succeed in today’s world.
Q. What is it you would like to the Asian community, how would you increase the participation from Asia for the Summits for the years to come?
We actually host an event called festival of media APAC in Singapore which has a huge Indian presence actually but what we love to do is to bring in more of audience from Asia, where we look around what’s happening in Asia everywhere from Australia to India to Indonesia to China, we would love to bring more those people to the global festival where they can actually learn what’s happening in LATAM part of the world, what’s happening in Europe, what’s happening in the UK, what’s happening in the US and see where they are leading someway and where they need to pull up in other ways and I think that would be amazing and we very much welcome a greater global participation particularly Asian community we would like to invite them more to our event.
Q. Do you work on a theme year on year and is there any particular theme this year which you have in Rome?
We try to stay away from themes as its bit out fashioned and this year its all about redefining purpose for media, so finding out how media re-establishes itself in a world where brands are taking back control, how do the brands understand what media is all about now, media planning and buying is all about, how do the new look agencies and how do established agencies fit in to the plans and how do media owners fit into the plan as well. Bringing together the ecosystem of media.
We are creating something that is very off spice that you will see in this event. we have ripped off the normal conference formula and created a really experiential and resonating experience for all our pool of delegates. Actually, we are going into the minds of thinkers. We have a future room which will look at conversation from AI, Bots, and IoT, then you have concept room that looks at how to create a most engaging video concept, then you got the control room that manages data, measurement, programmatic and you have the main stage. So it’s going to be very very different from any other event that takes place in the media world.
Q. Can you just tell our readers, out of the delegates, how many would be broadcasters, how many would be advertisers and agencies?
Yes, of course. Our make up in terms of clients/advertisers, around 40 to 55 percent will be clients – global brands from around the world, which is very exciting – agencies will be around 20 to 25 percent media owners and broadcasters similarly and the rest of 10 to 15 percent ad tech companies.
Q .Any surprises one can expect in the summit?
Absolutely, some really good surprises actually, One is we have a mindfulness yoga session which opens the mind, that relaxes one’s mind and how they can get their mindset for working, it’s really exciting. We got a secret session with the global CMO for Legon, it the only stage appearance she is going to make this year, so that really exciting
Q. Is there any message you would like to give the Indian community?
We would love to see more of you participating is festival of media and we love to get your opinions and media take not just in the Asian region but also from the global perspective and how in some places the east actually leading the west.
Courtesy: Live inputs and interaction with leaders at Festival of Media Rome was handled by Shankar B, CEO, Fourth Dimension Media.
