Web Marketing Festival 2022: what the biggest festival dedicated to digital innovation has left us with

In this article, we will not dispense email marketing, web analytics or digital branding pills. No, no. From the three days at the trade fair in Rimini, we have brought home something far more substantial: without this, no pill can hold.

WMF22: the marketing festival you don’t expect. Or do you?

The name Web Marketing Festival may make you think of a carousel of educational talks given by experts in the most disparate disciplines of digital marketing – from Branding to SEO, from Social Advertising to Web Design, to name but a few – an opportunity for networking and an expanse of stands where companies and start-ups present their products and services. Right: but the three days at the fair in Rimini were not just that.

We Make Future: human-centred innovation

Accessibility, artificial intelligence, inclusiveness. These three words could be enough to sum up the tenth edition of the largest festival dedicated to innovation. Or perhaps just one is enough: humanity.

Yes, because even after the first few speeches, the WMF22 slogan ‘We Make Future’ left no room for doubtful interpretation: the future is ideas, strategies and technologies, of course, to build a better world of tomorrow – online and ‘offline’ -. For the planet, for people, all of them.

Not just fine words. Actions and technologies for a better future

Inclusive language, the development of digital platforms that are also accessible to people with disabilities, the implementation of machine learning systems for medical applications and the unexpected success of digital content, winning results by virtue of a message that people identify with. All this was discussed, on a stage that hosted figures who are apparently irreconcilable with each other and who are instead, each in their own way, actors in the same script. What do tiktoker Mattia Stanga and Federico Faggin, the inventor of the Intel 4004 microprocessor, have in common?

They are people, who are building a future that is already in place.

And speaking of deeds, it was nice to see that the words (including those in music) of all the mainstage guests were simultaneously translated into sign language.

And where is the marketing? There is. And it is changing

All beautiful, you will say, but marketing? What you have read so far may have made you think of a fair of good intentions rather than a marketing festival. But it all adds up. The direction in which the world is heading defines new market trends and, in turn, new business strategies, languages and technological developments. After all, marketing is about selling and – every now and then it is good to be reminded of this – the buyer is a person: part of a humanity that now more than ever rhymes with diversity.

Good marketing, successful business: if it is done well, it does well

The most attentive brands have realised that to stay afloat they have to adapt their value proposition. Google’s algorithms change according to user behaviour, UX Design explores new avenues. The 4 P’s of marketing, product, price, place, promotion, according to Roberto Olivi, Director of Institutional Relations and Communication of BMW Italia S.P.A today are 3 and have radically changed: People, Purpose and Passion.

At WMF22, marketing was there and demonstrated how it is equipping itself to speak and act in an increasingly human way. OK, maybe not necessarily out of goodness, but welcome if this serves to shape an inclusive, accessible and sustainable reality.

Technology, yes. But let’s be human again

So, the Web Marketing Festival 2022 gave us a lot of practical insights for our work and a preview of future scenarios in technology, communication and marketing. But, surprisingly, the festival dedicated to innovation made us more human again.