What does 45+ hours of flight time, traveling on planes, trains, boats and automobiles to get halfway around the globe get you? Well for the team at Axiom, it meant getting valuable insight from the leaders of one of the most digitally advanced marketplaces in the world.
In the last week of June, Axiom’s partners attended Innovfest Unbound in Singapore – Southeast Asia’s largest innovation festival – featuring over 18,000 attendees and investors and start-ups from over 100 countries. The speakers and panelists included a collection of industry leaders from hugely successful global brands, marketing juggernauts, award-winning production teams and cutting-edge entrepreneurs. Brands such as Microsoft, Netflix, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce, IBM, Facebook, Porsche, Volkswagen, Twitter, Ubisoft and many more were representing their fields, sharing their wisdom, and interacting with thousands of eager attendees.
With eSports being one the company’s core competencies, Axiom took special interest in an eSports panel that featured several of the industry’s heaviest hitters, and had the opportunity to speak one-on-one with Hartman Harris, co-founder of EVOS eSports; a 15-team eSports company competing across Southeast Asia. We got to talk about the barriers to entry for eSports teams, the importance of organic sponsorships, and the future of e-gaming in the United States.
Connecting with people working in the Asian markets proved to be very insightful. One aspect stood out: consumers in those markets are more reticent to share information with digital companies based on the idea that it will make their own experiences more personalized. That behavior gives digital companies in Asia a much greater depth of consumer knowledge than their peers in the Western hemisphere, where sharing information is seen by many as an invasion of privacy.
Insights like these helped to open our eyes to the importance of searching outside of our own market for best practices and strategies for how best to help Axiom’s clients. There is no place too far to travel, especially in the digital age, to find ways to improve how you do business.