From Paris to Berlin: culture, digital and conference
After a brief stop in the Paris media scene – where I had the chance to meet journalists Stéphane Soumier and Anthony Morel – it was right in the middle of the Berlin film festival (Berlinale 2016) that French Digital Berlin welcomed me to present a promising sector in digital: Marketing Automation.
A few words on culture and current affairs…
At the Berlinale, the Golden Bear was awarded to Gianfranco Rosi’s film “Fuocoamarre”, a current-affairs documentary about refugees risking their lives to flee unbearable situations. And this is precisely the kind of events that Mr. Soumier covered at the start of his career, with the war in Bosnia and the fighting in Chechnya in the 1990s.
Despite these troubling current events, I was able to take a different kind of stage from that of movie actors, to present with optimism and determination Webmecanik’s ambitions on the German market.
Thank you French Digital Berlin!
Around fifty digital professionals braved the snow to come to the Rainmaking loft (!) And while sipping their beer – which makes the speaker thirsty – they were able to discover a benchmark of the sector’s major players (hubspot, marketo, pardot and eloqua) as well as the breadth of the field’s applications through concrete Webmecanik case studies:
- The Indexel agency propels Renault Sport into the world of Marketing Automation
- The Paprika agency boosts web revenue by +400% for Deep Nature
This presentation was punctuated by key data from studies by renowned agencies and firms. According to Bulldog solution, for example, “marketing automation reduces the number of ignored prospects from 80 to 25%.”
Triggering a series of questions that brought this conference to a close, the last part of the presentation looked at future prospects. Two main directions are emerging, without being exhaustive:
- the expansion of interconnections with an ecosystem including social media, SMS, video builders, CMS, CRM, etc.
- complementarity with predictive analytics solutions for increasingly relevant and personalized lead scoring
A promising digital scene:
Thinking back to the eloquent words from the BFM morning show I attended earlier that week: “here are initiatives led by young entrepreneurs, here is the growth to come, here are the jobs that are arriving”; I chatted over a beer (finally!) with the attendees – with many different perspectives – all united by the opportunities of the digital world. What a privilege to have had these encounters with so many cheerful and curious participants. Let us build jobs together in our sectors, with our different perspectives, and so that our European countries remain welcoming lands. Berlin: its culture, its digital scene and its jobs of the future.
French Digital Berlin
French Digital Berlin is the initiative of web professionals in Berlin for several years now: to build a meeting place for French people, French speakers and Francophiles in Germany.

@photo credit French Digital Berlin