Last week, two of our Evonovers headed to Milan to attend the Digital Design Days & Award, a 3-day event of professional conferences, workshops, and digital showcases. It was an incredible opportunity to hear from a deep line-up of extraordinary speakers, celebrating creativity in Digital Design and visionary storytelling.

The conference is relatively young, but full of important players in the sector of website production and digital services. One of our favorite speakers was Alex Brunori, head of creative agencies at Google MENA. His talk focused on methods of creating short YouTube videos that grab viewers’ attention .. in under 5 seconds!! His main point was the need to find the intersection between your content and the emotional drives of your audience. You should always keep in mind what they think, feel, fear, desire, and need, to create a space where your company’s story can live and thrive. Visual storytelling should not be a linear campaign, but instead a dynamic narrative that remains contextualized within your scope of experience and expertise.

He confirms that a “hub” kind of content - a series of related but dynamic episodes - is a winning video marketing strategy. Storytelling is changing, and the viewer’s attention is always more difficult to grab. We have just the first few seconds of a video to engage people and form an emotional connection that will gain us a few more seconds of their valuable time. When a brand creates content with the user's’ needs, passions, and relevant tension points in mind, they succeed in winning their attention and interest.

Overall, the conference gave us the opportunity to meet with other agencies, and share experiences about the processes we employ to meet certain objectives. We met with our colleagues and friends at Roll Studio and Thinking About, who won the DDD prize this year.  We also had the chance to hear about the difficulties that other companies had faced and how they managed to overcome these challenges.

Digital media and marketing is a sector in transformation and to keep up with the times you have to be willing to be energetic, creative, and innovative. The underlying message of many of the talks were .. diversify, diversify, diversify. Don’t get stuck in old ways, or you will get left behind!