Foreword to the ERA Europe News, Summer Edition 2017
Dear ERA Europe Members,
Welcome to our ERA Newsletter Summer edition.
Let us pause briefly for a moment and look back - what a show we had in Venice! But that is now in the past – Vegas is coming up after our well-deserved European summer break and we are already looking ahead to our next Multi-Channel Home Shopping conference in Sevilla, June 2018. Nevertheless in this edition you will find a full retrospective on our Venice event with articles, photos and reports on the main events and happenings there.
To provide our attendees with many opportunities to network with others, we organised several venues where attendees could engage with colleagues and friends in a relaxed atmosphere. Tuesday started with the traditional opening reception and continued later that evening at the spectacular rooftop bar which, due to the special police regulations, was arranged to be opened exclusively for our conference attendees. Three companies, Creative Concepts, YourProducts and Surging Media sponsored farewell drinks there on the last day too. The networking highlight was of course the 2017 EMMAs at the waterfront on Wednesday, where Sandy Češko of Studio Moderna received the main award of the evening for his lifetime achievements. We were lead through the evening by our charming host, Astrid van der Staaij.
The main event was the MCMS congress. Again fantastic speakers showed us the future of Multi-Channel Money Streams. For those who could not attend, you can find articles on some of the topics here. Our 2017 market study on 10 European Home Shopping markets, as well as customer media usage, was presented at the MCMS. The study expects (with variation from market to market) an overall growth of the European home shopping sector of more than 30% within the next 5 years. Not only our attendees were interested … nearly 300 articles were published on the study in newspapers and magazines. Our EUROPEAN members can download the full study free of charge on the ERA Europe membership website here.
Prior to the show, the new constellation of the European board of directors for 2017 – 2019 met for the first time. As most of you already know, Isabelle Fournier handed over her mandate as Chairwoman to the newly elected Chairwoman, Maja Umek. This is a good moment to thank Isabelle for her dedication and support to make ERA Europe great again.
Attending his first board meeting, Andrew Malcher from HighstreetTV volunteered to take over Maja´s position as Chairman of the Membership and Conference committee. He also kindly gave us a Member Company Interview which you can read in this newsletter.
In order to streamline our self-regulation process, the board made the decision to widen the scope of the seal usage to all customer communication. To avoid future time and effort on behalf of our SR-officer spending valuable time on formalities, the license agreement regarding the seal usage as well as the acceptance of the SR-procedure are not only mandatory but will be part of the general conditions of the association. Membership automatically implies acceptance of these conditions.
In order to deliver real value to our members regarding public affairs, we started restructuring this area 18 month ago. Since the conference we have joined EMOTA and with this move we are now well prepared to be up to speed with developments in Brussels and to actively represent our members’ interests.
So please enjoy the latest edition of this newsletter. We are convinced that you will find interesting articles and even more inspiration. 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