Making The Internet Great Again – Breakfast Briefing

Our hosts DigitasLBi have an excellent breakfast briefing in store for us with the theme of ‘Making the Internet Great Again’. The event will begin with a presentation on Bursting the Filter Bubble followed by a panel session on how advertising will continue to influence the evolution of the web.

08.30 – 09.00 Arrival and Breakfast

09.00 – 10.00 Presentation and Panel Session

10.00 -10.30 Closing Remarks and Networking

Bursting the Filter Bubble Presented by Sameer Modha, Head of Data Proposition, UK

In light of some of the seismic cultural shocks we’ve witnessed over the last year or so, there’s been a huge amount of discussion about the negative effects of the filter bubble. The results of the EU referendum and the recent US Election have both been used to highlight the extent to which our reliance on digital channels means that alternative viewpoints and life experiences are hidden from our view. In many assessments, the limiting effects of the filter bubble are evidence that the internet is broken.

But how accurate is this view? And what does this mean for marketers?

Should brands be trying to burst out of these bubbles in order to talk to as wide an audience as possible? Or should they instead be focusing on making recommender engines work better in order to speak at a deeper level with valued customers? The last year has reminded us that it’s impossible to understand everything. So is it time for brands to focus more sharply on their core audience to engage with them in more meaningful ways?

This practical session will help brands understand the challenges of recommender engines and argue that it’s important for consumers to train their recommender engines in order to make them perform better. In the same way that we train a puppy not to bring back objects that we don’t want to be exposed to, so we must train our filters to bring us higher quality recommendations that we are genuinely interested in.

The session will offer practical advice for brands looking to use the filter bubble more effectively to communicate with their audience. We’ll shed light on how this technology has been used successfully by any number of companies including Spotify, LinkedIn, Amazon and Google. Six years on from Eli Pariser’s ground breaking book “The Filter Bubble: What the internet is hiding from you”, this session will argue that the filter bubble isn’t bad. The technology just has to work better.

Panel Session – How will advertising continue to influence the evolution of the web?

Chaired by Fabio Labate, Media Strategist, DigitasLBi

Susan Smith, Editor of Third Force News

Jake Dubbins, CEO of Media Bounty and an advisor to Stop Funding Hate

Jim Swarbrick, Sales Director at MOAT