The blog

In this Point of View I want to address three questions about the Belgian digital landscape in which all companies and citizens operate at the moment. I wonder why Belgium is still lagging behind in terms of digital maturity and e-commerce compared with other countries within the European Union? But don’t be afraid, there are government measures underway or being applied as I write. And finally I’ll try to see what can be done better because, let’s be honest, in Belgium as in France and The Netherlands, there is a slight tendency to criticise what our politicians do. It’s all part of the game.

Some weeks ago, when driving my car, I was listening to the radio. The newsreader was talking about a contest in The Netherlands called “The Golden Windegg”, a competition organized by the “Foodwatch” organization. As a company you particularly hope not to be nominated for this award, and if you are, you cross your fingers in the hope that you don’t win the prize for most misleading product of the year. The “lucky” winner of the Golden Windegg 2015 was Albert Heijn, for their cranberries. Although these cranberries are sold as so-called “superfoods”, they consist of 68% added syrup and contain only 30% real cranberries. Needless to say, this is a prize the store should not be proud of.

Snapchat is hot! The instant messaging app that allows you to send photos or videos (these are the ‘Snaps’ in Snapchat) that can only be seen by the receiver for a maximum of 10 seconds, has reached 6 billion daily video views worldwide. More importantly, Belgium is the country with the second highest usage of Snapchat amongst youngsters, with 46% of teens using the app. (Webindex, 2015)

The House of Marketing attended two inspiring international marketing conferences: the DMA conference &THEN in Boston and the Web Summit in Dublin. During these events we participated in exhaustive workshops, attended inspiring lectures and gained a lot of new insights in order to stay at the forefront of marketing. We clustered our insights in an inspirational presentation:

Do you also have the feeling we are not doing enough to really help for example the Syrian refugees? I believe that we should structure our efforts to support people in need and that marketers are in the perfect position to take the lead. The five key rules from Music For Life I hand here can enable marketers to set up a campaign and create real impact.

On December 4th, The House of Marketing hosted a Lunch & Learn at the STIMA Congress where our Marketing Manager, Karolien Vanhelden, and Marketing Consulting Manager, Sophie Van Orden, inspired an audience of marketers to embrace technology.

The House of Marketing goes Dublin! Find out what our THoM’ers discovered during their three days at the Web Summit! Facebook offices, Google offices and testing new technologies… everything they learned in a quick recap here!

Drones are hot. For real. Whoever got the chance to visit the Web Summit in Dublin or The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam should already be convinced of the message that technology is taking over also in marketing. Dronevertising is the use of one or more unmanned, aerial drones for advertising & marketing communication purposes. My prediction? Dronevertising will come to Belgium in 2016. And it will make you stand out from the crowd.

Together with 5 other THoM’ers I was present at the Web Summit in Dublin. We saw a lot of speakers, spoke with many different and promising start-ups and tested the coolest new technologies, but one topic caught my interest:

In my previous blog post I already revealed insights that you won’t get without being in direct contact with Facebook professionals. My first day of a two-days session at the Facebook offices was about understanding your audience by digging into your data. The second day was about translating your brand purpose into storylines and content themes during a creative content hack.