Hamburg’s OMR Digital Festival comes back with a Bang!

After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, Germany’s OMR Digital Festival was held in Hamburg on May 17 and 18. And wow, it was worth the wait! A whopping 70,000 people — up from 52,000 in 2019 — streamed through the doors, creating an upbeat, fervent atmosphere as visitors connected, and reconnected, in person after the long wait.

Featuring some 500 exhibitors, which included industry giants Google, Meta, Salesforce, TikTok, YouTube, and Microsoft to name just a few, OMR22 cemented its reputation as one of Europe’s leading trade events for digital marketers. More than 800 speakers across nine stages and 200 Masterclass events served up a veritable digital intellectual feast that covered topics from analytics and influencer marketing, to adtech, omnichannel retailing, software developments, and finance.

Heavily focused on Germany’s digital market, OMR22 also included an increased dose of international content this year, with around a third of presentations held in English. Keynote speakers included filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, actor Ashton Kutcher, Pivot podcast presenter Scott Galloway, influencers Sophia Thiel and Rezo, Pinterest Chief Marketing Officer Andréa Mallard, Trivago CEO Axel Hefer, and Meta Director Global Business Marketing Asher Rapkin.

Accompanied by live music and a vast array of food stands and bars, the atmosphere was at times overwhelming, with visitors torn as to which events to attend, and how to push through the throng to get to meetings on time. That said, attendees arrived decked out in trainers — as you would a music festival — and were clearly ready to party. The outdoor bars were doing a roaring trade from 3pm on the first day, while TikTok’s 4pm happy hour event was reported to be a total crush.    

Keep reading for a quick round up of the key themes for influencer marketers heard at OMR22.

Creator Economy

An industry buzzword over the last two years, the development of the creator economy has brands, marketers and social networks laser focused on creators — how to collaborate with them, and how to monetize their activities.

Outlining Pinterest’s approach to creating a positive and inspirational online environment, Chief Marketing Officer Andréa Mallard noted creators want a supportive environment where they won’t get shredded for their ideas. She said the platform asked creators to sign a code agreeing to create content that is “intellectually generous. And it’s gratifying to see how many creators are flooding to Pinterest because they want to be part of an inspirational platform”.

On monetization, Pinterest allows creators to tag a brand used in a post to attract potential sponsorship “so you don’t have to have a million followers to get started”, Mallard said.

“Slime Queen” YouTuber Talisa Tossell, meanwhile, said her approach to making content was to make content she would watch herself. “Spot trending products, there is almost no trend that you can’t make an idea out of,” she said.  

But many traditional brands have yet to fully understand how to leverage influencer marketing over the long term, influencer marketing agency Gocomo Operations Team Lead Benedikt Baecker said.

“It’s sometimes tricky to get them to understand that no, we don’t have a week of approval time; that no, it’s OK if the logo is not perfectly seen. It’s a different world for them,” commented Baecker. “People like hearing success stories of how influencers boosted their entire turnover in one shot, but what is the next thing? What are they doing to step up? That’s what people are trying to find out because they have understood that influencer marketing is here to stay.”

TikTok

“With TikTok, what we start to see is numbers in the billions,” commented Hugo Boss SVP Global Marketing Miah Sullivan. Sullivan, who fronted two sessions to discuss Hugo Boss’ recent pivot to a social first marketing strategy, said the brand’s strategy was to “send shockwaves through the internet”. The Hugo brand’s #howdoyouHugo dance challenge delivered 6bn impressions on TikTok alone, she said.

Addressing the elephant in the room of how much such campaigns cost, Sullivan said: “Everyone thinks that we’re spending a lot of money but the truth is we’re very clever in how we negotiate and structure deals, and we have enough experience now that we know that when we invest in a particular talent, we get way more out of it on the back end”.

Speaking with Sullivan during a session entitled ‘New Rules of Engagement: The Hugo Boss Success Story on TikTok’, TikTok General Manager Global Business Solution DACH + NL, Thomas Wlazik, noted that TikTok users are twice as likely to engage with a brand from a brand post, and five times more likely to create a TikTok reviewing a product they discovered on the platform. Wlazik said that while each brand strategy will differ, authentic storytelling and having a brave and unconventional approach pays off on TikTok. He said brands should keep briefs to the essentials when working with TikTok creators.

“Try not to be too restrictive and too prescriptive. Give them a bit of space because the value that they bring when they are successful is that they are authentic, and they need to maintain that,” said Wlazik. “So spend a lot of time up front to find the creator that really matches your brand. That’s key and is so much more important than just followers.”

Gen Z

With Gen Z making up a third of the global population, it’s easy to see why engaging with these consumers now is key to any long-term brand strategy. Hugo Boss’ Sullivan noted that Gen Z spends more of their time on TikTok than on any other platform. Pinterest’s Mallard noted that although they are the youngest constituents on the platform, they are also the most willing to spend more money to shop with brands aligned to their values. “The average Gen Z person is going to spend 60% more for an eco-friendly product,” she said.

AR engagement

An instant internet hit, Snapchat’s recently released Crying filter was engaged with 1.3bn times in the first six days of release, said Snap Inc. Head of AR Product Strategy and Marketing Carolina Arguelles during a session titled ‘The next evolution of AR Shopping’. The Crying lens is “one of the most sophisticated and advanced pieces of AR” around, she said, adding “the camera isn’t an accessory, it is a daily interface, one that is used on a massive scale”.

70% of online shopping carts are abandoned while 9.6bn pounds of waste are created by online returns annually in the US, Arguelles said, adding that online returns rates were around 30-50% compared to 5-10% in-store. With this in mind, Arguelles said Snap was evolving into a tech company that would change the way brands engage with customers. The company’s newest AR technology lenses enable customers to ‘fit’ AR images of products like sunglasses to their faces in true size, or to try on a brand’s products in augmented reality and shop them directly from the app in its new Dress Up feature.

“Our research tells us this is what people want. Over the past year, 250m Snapchatters have virtually tried on products 5bn times,” said Arguelles. “The camera allows you to put your customer at the center of your strategy.”