All That Matters 2024

I just spent an inspirational few days at the All That Matters conference in Singapore. The conference is deliberately eclectic and that's what makes it so much fun.

All That Matters is a multitrack event that covers music, sport, gaming, web 3, marketing, content and AI. It’s a lot to get your head around and it’s impossible to take it all in, unless you have a clone.

To give you a tangible sense of the scope of the event, it kicked off with a keynote by Dr. Ben Goertzel on the topic of Artificial General Intelligence and ended up with a closing keynote from Kweku Mandela (yes, that Mandela) on the topic of driving commerce with compassion. There’s a lot of ground between those speakers and it seemed like All That Matters covered it all!

From a marketing perspective, the event also included a WFA CMO lunch and a report back to the conference from Cheryl Goh (Grab), Jiunn Shi (Zespri) and Rupen Desai (Una Terra Impact Fund).

My top five takeaways for marketers from All That Matters this year

1. Nurture “superfans”

Goldman Sachs estimates that the superfan economy is already worth $4.5bn per year. When you’re working in and around entertainment you need to think about how your brand can tap into the passions of superfans.

2. AI is indifferent to you

There was a great quote from Dr Ben Goertzel “The AI doesn’t love you. The AI doesn’t hate you. But the AI could choose to use your atoms for something more useful.” It got a bit dystopian there for a moment!

3. Reflections from the WFA

The WFA session obviously resulted in some pretty powerful moments of self reflection. Jiunn Shi said that marketers can sometimes be perceived as “vain, fickle and romantic” and Rupen Desai told the room that we have to get out of "our own little Truman show” in marketing. The advice from Cheryl, Jiunn and Rupen was:

• Reduce complexity
• Speak the language of your C Suite colleagues
• Imagine yourself as the CEO and then deliver what they want from you

4. The power of long term partnership

There was an excellent session on partnerships in entertainment. Both Kaveri Khullar from Mastercard and Willem Dinger from Unilever stressed the importance of long term partnerships. Kaveri referred to Mastercard’s long relationship with the Australian Open tennis. She said that the relationship is now so deep that Mastercard place as much emphasis on how to enhance the tournament experience for fans as they do on their brand entitlements. Willem echoed the need for long term thinking and referenced the partnership between Unilever and FIFA as an opportunity for Unilever to co-create with FIFA.

5. Informed innovation

Eugene Lee from McDonald’s had a great heuristic for innovation and cultural exploration. “If you don’t get it, don’t get into it.” He stressed the need to respect fan culture in any area of entertainment and not just stick a logo on a property and expect to succeed or be accepted by fans.

Finally, my favourite quote of the whole conference came right at the end, during the keynote by Kweku Mandela. “Content isn’t king. In a world with so much white noise, cut through is king”.

I’ll be stealing that for all of my pitch decks from now on.

Authored by Member Rohan Lightfoot founder Signal Consulting. Published on 25 September 2024