On 21 April 2017, the professional workshop “The Age of Digital” was held at Toong Coworking Space. The event attracted more than 150 guests working as marketing executives, managers and CEOs from companies in different sectors and some well-known media agencies.

Interestingly, the term “Digital” was viewed from different angles of three speakers’ positions: Prof. Marc Divine (CFVG MMSS Professor) opened the talk with his research findings on “The truth of digital transformation”. Prof. Marc carried a survey of 63 companies in B2B with 60% over 1000 employees. All of them (100%) turned out to be facing different challenges in digital transformation, top issues were with IoT, e-Service, e-Commerce, Dematerialization and CRM from Sales, Service and Customer Support functions. He has pointed out the main factors leading to the changes including new business models and comers, new employee digital behaviors, data exponential growth and most importantly new customer digital behaviors.

                                                                                 Professor Marc Divine - CFVG MMSS Professor

Ms. Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy, the second speaker from Nielsen Vietnam continued the talk by deeply analysing the customer behavior in digital age in next source of growth. She defined those customers as “omni-channels consumers” or “connected spenders” who obtained internet access and were willing to spend discretionary income, they appeared to prefer new and innovative products and were engaged with digital tools for work and personal activities. Promising markets identified were China, India, U.S and Indonesia. Vietnam showed great potential in top 10. Ms. Thuy’s study also figured out that number of connected spenders, which was expected to account for 40% of world population in 2025 would outgrow that of middle-class in term of number and importance especially in East Asia and Pacific. As in Vietnam, current 23 million spenders would boost to 40 million in 2025 with annual spending of $99 billion. Recommendations for marketers were: understanding how they engage with the brand, embracing digital opportunities, enhancing digital payment and business model innovation.

                                                    Ms. Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy - Senior Manager of Consumer Insights, Nielsen Vietnam

The third part of the talk witnessed the appearance of Mr. Konishi, CEO of MicroAd – a Japanese based digital agency with New trend of Video Ads topic. Mr. Konishi started with some surprising impressive statistics of his own research: human being, by video, could receive information 5000 times more than static ad. In advertising, a video ad was viewed 15 times which obtain 170% of awareness compared with static ad. From 2014 to 2018 in North America, budget spent in digital has dramatically increased while traditional TV ad showed no progress. In Vietnam, the market size of video ads would jump from $3.15 billion to $58 billion in period 2015-2021. The Japanese CEO ended his presentation with four stories of Video ads succeeding in attraction, contents and native, referrer, right timing and location. “Ad is just ad if it does not create “Synchronize” between consumers and advertisers”, he concluded.

                                                                                            Mr. Konishi - CEO, MicroAd Vietnam

For one hour after the event, all guests were active in networking and business opportunities exchange.