ProcureCon 2023: The Human Connection and Collaboration

At ProcureCon last week, IDX was reminded of the power of live events to build human connections. To create powerful moments and experience them. Our team was fully present on the floor and on stage. Our CEO Myles Peacock and Chief Product Officer Apeksha Mishra shared IDX’s vision for making MarCom more effective and influential through the wise application of Link, our new content intelligence solution, and AI. Additionally, we heard incredible insights (some about us directly) by speakers from global brands and partners.

In the spirit of connection, we want to share some of the important takeaways we captured from this event. The themes of building trust and working collaboratively with an internal team, an agency, and with technology resonated throughout:

• A number of speakers discussed how agency rosters are transforming. Businesses such as AstraZeneca are focused increasingly on outcomes rather than just deliverables. This bridges the gap in perception between clients and their agency partners. Those outcomes include increased speed to market and reduced time.
• Attendees also learned that businesses know they need to efficiently manage MarTech and AdTech stacks and content that runs throughout them. Decision makers need to understand the digital landscape and identify unused services and software within organizations.
• Myles and Apeksha focused on the need for a human and tech approach to address wasteful content creation. In addition, a foundation of taxonomy and governance is an essential step before businesses can connect their content or before using AI – otherwise it will be garbage in and garbage out.
• In a powerful panel conversation, Apeksha discussed how a strategic application of AI aligns content more efficiently with the customer journey at a time when that journey evolves constantly through a myriad of touchpoints and devices. AI can help a business unleash first-party data around audiences and content, which makes MarCom more effective and relevant.
• We heard highlights from the ANA’s report “Procurement: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” and insights from our Forrester Study on the challenges of disconnected content and the importance of being responsible stewards.
• Another important theme was the need for the collective marketing and procurement industry to take responsibility for the content we put out into the world. Our content must be authentic and culturally relevant to the audiences we serve around the world. We need to be empathetic about the impact of the messages we create and assumptions we make about our audiences. We also must take responsibility for the amount of content we are making, the digital wasteland we need to clean up, and the impact it is having on the environment.  Being more mindful about our content can help brands achieve important outcomes such as meeting their diversity goals, reducing their carbon footprint, and improving their own storytelling capabilities at the same time.

The Day 2 keynote was given by professional speaker and author Jake French, who really summarized the themes so many before and after spoke about, such as the importance of “rolling with it” at all times – personally and professionally, including how you manage technology. He reflected on his life change from being a teenager to becoming a quadriplegic – from wondering where a party was to wondering if he would ever breathe on his own. His positive, humorous take on life, and the points he shared about making the most of your “hot pink wheelchair moments,” reminded us all to be strong no matter what life throws at us.

The most important overarching themes were about taking time to do things right: to organize your foundation of agency partners correctly in order to align on the right outcomes . . . to ensure your taxonomy is aligned with your content . . . to collaborate effectively . . . to be mindful of our actions, in particular the environmental impact we have when we fail to collaborate or we don’t take the time to be organized with our processes.

Doing things right is something we’ve been discussing as a company through our research with Forrester on the poor management of MarTech stacks. Disjointed MarTech and AdTech stacks, duplicative wasteful content, lack of collaboration, and lack of trust among stakeholders – all of this is having a bad impact and must change. Now.

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