We talked to Jindrich Faborsky, a Czech entrepreneur and digital marketer, listed in the Czech Forbes \u201930 under 30\u2032 in 2016, founder of Marketing Festival, which is the biggest marketing conference in the Czech Republic with over 1.500 marketing experts attending. He\u00a0also runs Digisemestr, an educational project where he and other experts teach 250 aspiring young marketers the basics of digital marketing.\u00a0He has 7 years of experience ranging from working in startups, as a team leader in an agency and 2 years as a teacher of digital marketing at a University.<\/p>\n
It’s a great honor for me. I think they were interested in our passion for improving the format of marketing conferences and our overall focus on bringing quality digital marketing education to the Czech Republic. But I think the decisive factor was when a Forbes editor visited the Festival once: he later told me that he’s left the conference with several sheets of paper full of ideas, notes, tactics and strategies he was going to use for marketing of the magazine immediately. So that’s what we’re doing \u2013 a conference without the usual useless drivel, that was always our goal.<\/p>\n
As far as my previous ventures go, I led an agency marketing team, tried (and failed) to build a startup and launched a private educational programme for marketers. I’ve also done a bit of consulting for lots of companies.<\/p>\n
I think it’s a great project. Basically, it’s a conference done right, which is what separates us from the rest of the pack. We have a very thorough selection process for the speakers, stunning visuals and audio, great catering and production overall. We’ve also added parties and concerts with bands from all over the world to turn a conference into a Festival. In the Czech Republic, we’re something of a love-brand as far as marketing conferences go and we’ve become a sort of must-attend event in the industry \u2013 last year, we sold 1.000 tickets (270\u20ac) in 8 minutes. That’s something we’re really proud of. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
A few trends come to mind. Most importantly, that the differentiation between online and offline in marketing might finally prove to be irrelevant. What I see as most important is being able to connect all the ‘new’ stuff in marketing and technology (machine learning, AI, recommendation engines) to the traditional concepts, tried and tested by decades of practice \u2013 creative approaches, advertising and ‘proper’ marketing strategies. Those who will be able to connect the two worlds will be the most successful.<\/p>\n
Overall, I think that the demand for quick tips, tricks and random techniques on how to improve X in X steps will drop in 2017, in favour of thinking strategically, which I think is something digital-only marketers lack the most.<\/p>\n
I hope you’re not expecting a different answer than ‘It depends’. Despite the fact that we’ve seen incredible progress in technology and buzzwords like VR and AR are flying all over the place, I think the customer will remain pretty much the same in five years time.<\/p>\n
Some Eastern European markets are interesting in that you can’t apply many of the tactics and tools the way they’re used for example in the US. A lot of that, especially in PPC and SEO, comes down to a simple factor \u2013 language \u2013 as most of these tools are English-only. Interestingly, the Czech Republic is one of the last countries in which Google is the no. 2 player on the market. The Czech Seznam.cz retains the largest market share (a solid 35-40 %) and it offers a PPC system as well. Being a PPC specialist in the Czech Republic is therefore a very different job than in other countries.<\/p>\n
That’s a hard one to answer. I see a lot more value in discussion and orienting towards strategy, connecting channels, turning ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ marketing into one. Most of the companies I’ve come across here already manage to get the most out of all the ‘channels’ out there. That’s no longer a competitive advantage.<\/p>\n
Bikes, bikes and more bikes! I spent 3-4 months every year travelling on motorbikes. That’s where I come up with new business ideas and innovations. For instance, our educational project for students called Digisemestr, where we teach 250 students the basics of digital marketing, came to my mind when I was travelling to Slovenia in April 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We talked to Jindrich Faborsky, a Czech entrepreneur and digital marketer, listed in the Czech Forbes \u201930 under 30\u2032 in 2016, founder of Marketing Festival, which is the biggest marketing conference in the Czech Republic with over 1.500 marketing experts attending. He\u00a0also runs Digisemestr, an educational project where he and other experts teach 250 aspiring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":5222,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[11,49,50],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n