It’s been a week or so since our team attended the ClickZ Live 2015 conference in Shanghai. Now that we’ve had a little time to decompress, I figured I’d write a few words about the conference for any readers that may be interested in attending a ClickZ event in the future.
What is the ClickZ Live Conference?
ClickZ Live is an event that brings together digital marketing experts from around the globe for 2-3 days of panel discussions, workshops, and networking. The conference moves to cities in different countries throughout the year, with a unique agenda and set of speakers for each location. Here’s how the people at ClickZ introduce themselves on their website:
“ClickZ Live is a next-generation event that addresses the increasing change of pace in the digital marketing industry, to meet the diverse educational needs of today’s online marketing community. Over the past few years, the engaging educational content that marketers have come to expect from the SES brand has expanded beyond just search marketing to include the very latest strategic and tactical thinking from expert marketing practicioners in the fields of social media, display, mobile, digital TV advertising, and marketing. As the demand for more diverse and comprehensive content covering the entire digital marketing sector continues to grow, ClickZ Live will be right there with it!”
Guest Speakers
Panel discussion on marketing innovation
Guest speakers are a make or break part of any conference, and ClickZ definitely delivered with its Shanghai event. Most every talk was China-focused and covered a number of different topics, including:
- E-commerce
- Mobile marketing
- Programmatic buy
- O2O
- Content marketing
Speakers came from a number of different backgrounds and companies, such as:
- Bryan Wang, Head of Marketing Science, Facebook
- Amy Chen, Digital Marketing Director, Lenovo
- Bowen Li, Senior Product Manager, Baidu
- Lawrence Wang, Social Media Director, AIG
- Eugene Chew, CDO, JWT Shanghai
Highlights from ClickZ Shanghai 2015
The event was a great opportunity to get a different perspective on a number of hot topics in the digital marketing world, including:
- How the O2O landscape is continuing to evolve in China.
- Using the latest data analytics technology to better track conversions across multiple devices and marketing channels (“omni-channel attribution” for buzzword enthusiasts).
- How traditional media buyers can start transitioning more of their ad spend toward programmatic buy.
As a number of speakers came from Western countries, it was interesting to compare their experience with what we’re seeing in China. Programmatic buy, for example, is still far more developed in the US than in China, though the latter is making progress (roughly 23% of digital media spend in China is programmatic). O2O, on the other hand, is still considerably more popular in China than in Western markets, and WeChat along with a host of other apps are continuing to raise the bar when it comes to bringing online users offline and vice versa.
While the learning opportunities were great, by far the coolest part of the conference was meeting a number of our newsletter and blog readers from around the globe. We met readers from the UK, Singapore, New Zealand, China, and a number of other countries, and everyone was as friendly as can be. Having a core group of loyal readers around the world means a lot to us, so thanks everyone for the support. We greatly appreciate your feedback.
We thoroughly enjoyed the free cocktails at the end of day one
Interested in Attending a ClickZ Conference?
The date for the next China event hasn’t been set yet, but no matter where you’re based, there’s probably a ClickZ event within range of a short flight. Check out the schedule here.
Overall we’re really happy with the experience and looking forward to next year. Did you make it to this year’s conference? What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below.