With less than two months to go until the opening of this year's annual Marketing and Media Weekly conference, it's high time to take a look at the highlights of what awaits attendees on five stages with a specialist programme.
Antonis Kocheilas, until recently Global CEO of Ogilvy Advertising and from this year Global Head of Brand Transformation Strategies across Ogilvy, will provide the opening keynote. In his talk, he will show how AI can help transform society from an information economy to a so-called inspiration economy. He will be followed by British experimental psychologist Charles Spence, who runs a specialist cross-modal perception lab at the University of Oxford - in layman's terms, he looks at how different senses affect our perceptions in ways we wouldn't expect. His research is helping international brands change their business and marketing strategies, but it is also giving doctors, for example, new tools to treat seriously ill patients.
Artificial intelligence in and around us
The unifying theme of the conference is the phenomenon of AI with all its good and bad sides. How we involve it in the creation of strategies, how it helps us to collect and analyse big data, how we can create media content with it - including TV and newspaper coverage - or drive the deployment of paid formats in different media outlets.
Representatives from media houses, agencies and consultancies that specialise in the research and application of AI tools will talk about this. However, they will also talk about the ethical side of using AI in communication and marketing and the risks associated with the indiscriminate replacement of the human element with its artificial alternative.
Alastair McCapra, head of the UK's Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and Christina Førsgard, author of the Ethical Principles for Working with Digital Tools in Communication, among others, will focus on this. We get an insight into the newly completed white paper on the use of AI in communication from its co-authors Nathan Kemp from the UK office of Grayling and Arne Mosselman from the Amsterdam-based consultancy Ainigma.
Secrets of success by the best
This year's Forum Media conference will not be without examples of the best that has been produced in marketing and communications in the last year. Thirty years after the fall of communism, which opened the door to international markets for the Mladá Boleslav-based Škoda Auto, the global head of marketing for the car brand , Meredith Kelly, will look back at how far Škoda Auto has come in that time and where it is heading in its marketing in the future.
The owner of the Mattoni 1873 brand, Padua-born Alessandro Pasquale, will show how he pushed for a plastic bottle backup system against almost everyone in the country. The extraordinary success of the Lasvit glass brand will be presented by its marketing manager Klára Poliakov at Milan Design Week. And Tomáš Houska from the Czech Olympic Committee will describe the difficult journey to international recognition for the clothing collection of Czech Olympians in Paris.
On the stage of the PR Summit there will be a showcase of six award-winning works from the current edition of the Lemur competition. This year's novelty of the conference will be the declassification of the shortlists before the autumn Effie Awards.
International workshops and shitstorm as a bonus
For the first time ever this year, the organizers have included workshops with international lecturers. Steven Mehringer, whose talk on AI was one of the best-rated last year, will tell us how he has progressed since last year in discussing with AI what it can and cannot do, how much it makes up and why it does it. His workshop will be led by him and AI together without exaggeration.
Sascha Devigne from Düsseldorf, Germany, will in turn show how AI can produce TV news almost without human intervention: not even a presenter is needed. And international expert Ivor Rothwell from IBM will demonstrate in practice the capabilities of conversational AI and its involvement in customer care.
The highlight of the programme will be a lecture followed by a discussion on shitstorm as a social media phenomenon. It will be given by philosopher and publicist Tereza Matějčková together with renowned architect Jaroslav Wertig.
More on the programme here.
Source: mam.cz
