Foreword to the ERA Europe News, Autumn 2018
Dear ERA Europe Members, Dear Readers of the ERA Europe News Autumn edition,
I would like to start this newsletter with some considerations: sometimes it feels as if your baby is an ugly duckling! Questions and doubts become your painful companions...but we all know how the story ends...the ugly duckling will turn out to be a beautiful swan and everybody lives happily ever after. This is how I feel about our association and its logo!
For many years our association logo has looked like something which can best be described as a crazy-80s-pacman-fish-look-alike - it's vintage, it's multi-coloured and it even contains different fonts. At times in the past I have had a number of massive question marks, but since June 1st this year my perception has changed and during the summer I have even started to like this acronym of ours “ERA Europe”. Meaningful? Who knows. Sometimes newspapers call us and ask us about our opinion of the electronic footprint of microwave ovens…however to me and everyone working hard for this association, it stands for continuity, sustainability, joint efforts as an industry and common sense. That is why we were founded, this is how we have developed over the past years and is the way we want to support the European and Global Multi-Channel Home Shopping Industry in the future.
This summer started with a surprise and it became a very intensive struggle for all of us to maintain our global industry network. We started this journey in Seville with the very strong commitment from the European industry and all global players present to be in Las Vegas at the dates originally set for the D2C. ERA Europe further gave a clear commitment to organise the communication and to do whatever it took to make it happen.
A few weeks later we learned that industry veterans had set up a new institution, the PDMI, (Performance Driven Marketing Institute) and planned to fill this painful gap. They announced their intention to find a hotel in Las Vegas at the communicated dates and they managed to book The Venetian hotel at very short notice. Surpassing the expectations of most of us, they were able to organise an event to meet everybody’s needs.
Meanwhile the PDMI is already sprinting to organise the Spring event in Miami. Our best wishes to them to also succeed in that task. ERA Europe and the PDMI have entered into discussions how to shape our global future. Key is to jointly reconstruct the global network which implies granting mutual member benefits, i.e. most of all, access to the events at preferred member rates. So let's start from there and shape a bright future for our global industry network. Whatever step that will trigger, we shall see after we have made the first one, and you can be sure that we will keep you posted asap of future developments.
So back to business. We really do hope you will enjoy reading this Autumn edition of our newsletter. It contains a retrospective of the 2018 PDMI Summit in Las Vegas, an interview with Ralf Dümmel, DS Produkte who won the 2018 EMMA for the Best New Business Model, expert articles by two of our 2018 MCMS speakers Mattias Brähammar and Kanaway Yusingco, as well as latest industry insights from Budd Margolis, industry news from Studio Moderna and an update about what is going on in Brussels.
So please enjoy the latest edition of this newsletter. We hope that you will find interesting articles and even more inspiration. If you can spare a few seconds we would be grateful to get your feedback about the newsletter. Please complete our quick 1-question survey.
Finally, we would like to gratefully thank all our contributors to this newsletter.
Best regards,
Dr. Julian Oberndörfer
Chief Executive Officer/ Administrateur Delegués
Electronic Retailing Association Europe