"It was an excellent event, it’s always difficult in the current market to take time out from the business, but when you turn up and you’re blown away by the quality and breadth of the speakers you realise it makes sense. Some of the agency presentations were out of this world, but it was presentation after presentation about embracing change." said delegate Paul Whitehurst, managing director of Cestrian Imaging.
Speakers from brands such as Tesco and Samsung talked about sustainability and effectiveness and senior figures from the agency world, including Saatchi & Saatchi, TBWA and McCann, discussed the creative decision making process, intelligent use of cross media, Augmented Reality (AR), QR codes, Near Field Communication (NFC) and the power of print.
Industry experts from the US and Europe also covered topics ranging from consumer insight, new trends in digital textile printing and some of the early findings of the Fespa World Wide Survey.
"There are a lot of opportunities out there and if you adopt the attitude that these are exciting times and embrace the speed of that change then it has to be positive and this was what came across from the event and as usual Fespa does these things well," said Whitehurst.
Whitehurst’s comments were echoed by a senior buying delegate: "It was a really informative event, what I found was that a lot of the presentations didn’t just apply to wide-format digital, a lot of them also applied to other applications. Michelle Adams presentation on the decision making process of shoppers was especially interesting."
According to Fespa head of events and new media Duncan MacOwan, the early feedback from delegates had been very positive.
"The message that came though from the presentations was that we all need to better understand the challenges our customers face and then try and bring them something new and offer some insight," said MacOwan.
He added many of the themes of the Global Summit would be carried over to the Fespa show in June.
"One of the new elements for the show will be the Creative Corner, which will be very much aimed and the creatives, designers and brand owners. Equally we’re looking at taking some of the business building skills workshops from the summit to the show, pitched at SMEs."
Fespa 2013 takes place from 25-29 June at London’s Excel.
